This paper investigates the effect of early exposure to neighborhood crime on subsequent criminal behavior of youth exploiting a unique natural experiment between 1986 and 1998 when refugee immigrants to Denmark were assigned to neighborhoods quasi-randomly. We find strong evidence that the...

In the American South, post-bellum economic development may have been restricted in part by white landowners' access to low-wage black labor. This paper examines the impact of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 on black out-migration and subsequent agricultural development. Flooded counties...

This paper reviews the evidence on the efficacy of neighborhood and school interventions in improving the long-run outcomes of children growing up in poor families. We focus on studies exploiting exogenous sources of variation in neighborhoods and schools and which examine at least medium-term...

The Great Migration–the massive migration of African Americans out of the rural South to largely urban locations in the North, Midwest, and West–was a landmark event in US history. Our paper shows that this migration increased mortality of African Americans born in the early twentieth...

We estimate peer effects in paid paternity leave in Norway using a regression discontinuity design. Coworkers and brothers are 11 and 15 percentage points, respectively, more likely to take paternity leave if their peer was exogenously induced to take up leave. The most likely mechanism is...

The extent of demographic changes in Europe is much more drastic than in the United States. This paper studies the effects of population aging on the interactions between economic growth and living standards in Europe with labor market and pension reform, behavioral adaptations, and...

We show that isolated capital cities are robustly associated with greater levels of corruption across US states, in line with the view that this isolation reduces accountability. We then provide direct evidence that the spatial distribution of population relative to the capital affects different...