Most poverty studies build on measures that take account of recurring incomes from sources such as labour or social transfers. However, other financial resources such as savings and assets also affect living standards, often in very significant ways. Previous studies that have sought to...

Matching has become a popular approach to estimate average treatment effects. It is based on the conditional independence or unconfoundedness assumption. Checking the sensitivity of the estimated results with respect to deviations from this identifying assumption has become an increasingly...

Child maltreatment is a major public health problem with significant consequences for individual victims and for society. In this paper we quantify for the first time the economic costs of fatal and non-fatal child maltreatment in the UK in relation to several short-, medium- and long-term...

In a world increasingly globalized, multiple language skills can create more employment opportunities. Several countries include language training programs in active labor market programs for the unemployed. We analyze the effects of a language training program on the re-employment probability...

In this paper, we build a new test of rational expectations based on the marginal distributions of realizations and subjective beliefs. This test is widely applicable, including in the common situation where realizations and beliefs are observed in two different datasets that cannot be matched....

We study a psychologically based foundation for choice errors. The decision maker applies a preference ranking after forming a 'consideration set' prior to choosing an alternative. Membership of the consideration set is determined both by the alternative specific salience and by the rationality...

This paper extends existing work on labor force participation dynamics by distinguishing between full-time and part-time employment and allowing unobserved heterogeneity in the effects of previous employment outcomes, children and education on employment dynamics. The results reveal significant...

This paper develops and estimates a simple structural model of household decisions regarding child labor and schooling. We argue that part of the conflicting results from the previous literature related to the effect of improvements in economic conditions on child labor derives from the...

Firms offer highly complex contracts to their employees. These contracts contain a mix of incentives, such as fixed wages, bonus payments, promotion options, and layoff threats. In general, economists understand how incentives motivate employees but not why a particular mix should be used. In...

Using data from three waves of Add Health we find that being very attractive reduces a young adult's (ages 18-26) propensity for criminal activity and being unattractive increases it for a number of crimes, ranging from burglary to selling drugs. A variety of tests demonstrate that this result...