"Taking an empirical economics perspective, this volume assesses the causal impacts of disadvantage on youth outcomes and how policy interventions can alleviate those impacts. Each chapter develops a framework to describe the relationship between youth disadvantages and later life outcomes,...

Offering new research on strategic factors in the development of the nineteenth century American economy—labor, capital, and political structure—the contributors to this volume employ a methodology innovated by Robert W. Fogel, one of the leading pioneers of the "new economic history."...