The vast majority of immigrants to the United States at the beginning of the 20th century adopted first names that were common among natives. The rate of adoption of an American name increases with time in the US, although most immigrants adopt an American name within the first year of arrival....

This paper studies how targeted cash transfers to women affect their empowerment. We use a novel identification strategy to measure women's willingness to pay to receive cash transfers instead of their partner receiving it. We apply this among women living in poor households in urban Macedonia....

The impact of school resources on the quality of education in developing countries may depend crucially on whether resources are targeted efficiently. In this paper we use a randomized experiment to analyze the impact of a school grants program in Senegal, which decentralized a portion of the...

We study the intergenerational effects of maternal education on children's cognitive achievement, behavioral problems, grade repetition and obesity. We address the endogeneity of maternal schooling by instrumenting it with variation in schooling costs during the mother's adolescence. Using...

This paper extends the method of local instrumental variables developed by Heckman and Vytlacil (1999, 2001, 2005) to the estimation of not only means, but also distributions of potential outcomes. The newly developed method is illustrated by applying it to changes in college enrollment and wage...

This paper presents new evidence that increases in college enrollment lead to a decline in the average quality of college graduates between 1960 and 2000, resulting in a decrease of 8 percentage points in the college premium. The standard demand and supply framework (Katz and Murphy, 1992, Card...

In a randomized control trial, the precision of an average treatment effect estimator can be improved either by collecting data on additional individuals, or by collecting additional covariates that predict the outcome variable. We propose the use of pre-experimental data such as a census, or a...