During the 1930s the federal government embarked upon an ambitious series of grant programs designed to counteract the Great Depression. Public works and relief programs combated unemployment by hiring workers and building social overhead capital while the Agricultural Adjustment Administration...

Poverty rates on Native American Indian reservations are triple the US average. Small business incubation programs, available elsewhere in the US, are sparse on the reservations. Small businesses are potent drivers of US economic growth. Some 25.5 million entrepreneurs generate more than 50% of...

Much has been written identifying property price effects of historic preservation policies. Little attention has been paid to the possible policy endogeneity in hedonic price models. This paper outlines a general case of land use regulation in the presence of externalities and then demonstrates...

This paper shows nonparametric identification of quantile treatment effects (QTE) in the regression discontinuity design. The distributional impacts of social programs such as welfare, education, training programs and unemployment insurance are of large interest to economists. QTE are an...

Absences in Chicago Public High Schools are 3-7 days per year higher in first period than at other times of the day. This study exploits this empirical regularity and the essentially random variation between students in the ordering of classes over the day to measure how the returns to classroom...

We consider taxation by a utilitarian government in the presence of heterogeneous locations within a country. We show that a utilitarian government never equalizes after-tax incomes, even when it can impose group-specific lump-sum taxes. If migration is impossible, a utilitarian government may...

Urbanization economies - the effects on productivity and utility created endogenously by larger cities - are a fundamental component of both the economic geography of modern societies and the perpetuation of innovation and economic growth at a national level. Cities account for vast majorities...

Using recent data from southern California and Mexico we challenge the notion that the demographic profile of post-1970 Mexican migrants to the United States has remained constant. We find that more recent cohorts of migrants: (1) are more likely to settle permanently in the United States, (2)...

Using Census and Current Population Survey data spanning 1959 through 1999, we assess the relative contributions of two factors to the decline in the gender wage gap: changes across cohorts in the relative slopes of men's and women's age-earnings profiles, versus changes in relative earnings...

This comparative study of the relationship between family economic background and adult outcomes in the United States and Canada addresses three questions. First, is there something to explain? We suggest that the existing literature finds that there are significant differences in the degree of...