In the 1980s, many U.S. cities initiated programs reserving a proportion of government contracts for minority-owned businesses. The staggered introduction of these set-aside programs is used to estimate their impacts on the self-employment and employment rates of African-American men. Black...

Well known CPI of urban consumers is never revised. Recently initiated chained CPI is initially released every month (ICPI), for that month without delay within BLS and for the previous month with one month delay to the public. Final estimates of chained CPI (FCPI) are released every February...

Production capital and technology, fundamental to understanding output and productivity growth, are unobserved except at disaggregated levels and must be estimated prior to being used in empirical analysis. We develop and apply a new estimation method, based on advances in economics, statistics,...

Indian immigrants in the United States and other wealthy countries are successful in entrepreneurship. Using Census data from the three largest developed countries receiving Indian immigrants in the world -- the United States, United Kingdom and Canada -- we examine the performance of Indian...

Birth order has been found to have a surprisingly large influence on educational attainment, yet much less is known about the role of birth order on delinquency outcomes such as disciplinary problems in school, juvenile delinquency, and adult crime: outcomes that carry significant negative...

It is notoriously difficult to identify peer effects within the family, because of the common shocks and reflection problems. We make use of a novel identification strategy and unique data in order to gain some purchase on this problem. We employ data from the universe of children born in...

The past century witnessed a dramatic improvement in public health, the rise of modern medicine, and the transformation of the hospital from a fringe institution to one essential to the practice of medicine. Despite the central role of medicine in contemporary society, little is known about how...