A longstanding question in the economics of the family is the relationship between sibship size and subsequent human capital formation and economic welfare. If there is a causal quot;quantity-quality tradeoff,quot; then policies that discourage large families should lead to increased human...

This paper investigates the question whether long-term human capital outcomes are affected by the duration of maternity leave, i.e. by the time mothers spend at home with their newborn before returning to work. Employing RD and difference-in-difference approaches, this paper exploits an...

This paper investigates the effects of immigration from a developing country to a developed country during pregnancy on offspring's outcomes. We focus on intermediate and long-term outcomes, using quasi-experimental variation created by the immigration of Ethiopian Jews to Israel in May 1991....

The nation's largest charter management organization is the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP). KIPP schools are emblematic of the No Excuses approach to public education, a highly standardized and widely replicated charter model that features a long school day, an extended school year, selective...

Parents gauge school quality in part by the level of student achievement and a school's racial mix. The importance of school characteristics in the housing market can be seen in the jump in house prices at school district boundaries where peer characteristics change. The question of whether...

Estimates using admissions lotteries suggest that urban charter schools boost student achievement, while charter schools in other settings do not. Using the largest available sample of lotteried applicants to charter schools, we explore student-level and school-level explanations for this...

The past half‐century has seen economic research become increasingly empirical, while the nature of empirical economic research has also changed. In the 1960s and 1970s, an empirical economist's typical mission was to "explain" economic variables like wages or GDP growth. Applied econometrics...

Natural and agricultural resources for which there is a substantial black market, such as coca, opium, and diamonds, appear especially likely to be exploited by the parties to a civil conflict. Even legally traded commodities such as oil and timber have been linked to civil war. On the other...

Centralized school assignment algorithms must distinguish between applicants with the same preferences and priorities. This is done with randomly assigned lottery numbers, nonlottery tie-breakers like test scores, or both. The New York City public high school match illustrates the latter, using...

Lottery estimates suggest oversubscribed urban charter schools boost student achievement markedly. But these estimates needn't capture treatment effects for students who haven't applied to charter schools or for students attending charters for which demand is weak. This paper reports estimates...