Title I of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act explicitly directed more federal aid for K-12 education to poorer areas for the first time in US history, with a goal of promoting regional convergence in school spending. Using newly collected data, we find some evidence that Title I...

This paper contributes to the existing literature on the effect of legal status on educational access among immigrant youth in the United States. The Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986 granted amnesty to undocumented immigrants who entered the United States before 1982. Using a...

There is a strong, positive, and well-documented correlation between education and health outcomes. In this paper, we attempt to understand to what extent this relationship is causal. Our approach exploits two changes to British compulsory schooling laws that generated sharp across-cohort...

We investigate the relationship between HIV, marriage and nonmarital sexual activity, with a focus on adolescent behaviors. We use data from 45 Demographic and Health Surveys to examine how adolescent behavior among women born from 1958 to 1965 are related to the subsequent spread of HIV over...

We examine characteristics of the 400 wealthiest individuals in the United States over the past three decades as tabulated by Forbes Magazine, and analyze which theories of increasing inequality are most consistent with these data. The people of the Forbes 400 in recent years did not grow up as...

Separate identification of the price and quantity of human capital has important implications for understanding key issues in economics. Price and quantity series are derived for four education levels. The price series are highly correlated and they exhibit a strong secular trend. Three...

It is often assumed that early life circumstances, in particular before age two, are important for later human capital development. Using experimental variation in the timing of benefits from a conditional cash transfer program, we test the hypothesis that intervention starting in utero and...

A model of human capital investment and activity choice is used to explain facts describing gender differentials in the levels and returns to human capital investments and occupational choice. These include the higher return to and level of schooling, the small effect of healthiness on wages,...

Using a new nationally representative dataset, we find minor differences in test outcomes between black and white infants that disappear with a limited set of controls. However, relative to whites, all other races lose substantial ground by age two. Combining our estimates with results in prior...