In 1954 the United States Supreme Court ruled that separate schools for black and white children were "inherently unequal." This paper studies whether the desegregation plans of the next 30 years benefited black and white students in desegregated school districts. Data from the 1970 and 1980...

We show that the week after selling a large-prize Texas Lotto winning ticket, a retailer experiences a 12 to 38 percent relative increase in ticket sales. Some increase persists for up to 40 weeks. We document that the sales response increases with jackpot size and is larger in areas with more...

We make use of a new data resource -- merged birth and school records for all children born in Florida from 1992 to 2002 -- to study the relationship between birth weight and cognitive development. Using singletons as well as twin and sibling fixed effects models, we find that the effects of...

Using data recently collected by the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we find that the intergenerational correlation in expenditures is no larger than that in income, suggesting limited intra-family risk-sharing. On the other hand, even after controlling for the intergenerational correlation in...