This paper estimates peer effects both from parents to children and from older to younger siblings in academic fields of study in high school. Despite the importance of family peer effects, causal evidence is scarce due to correlated unobservables and a lack of data. Our setting is Sweden, where...

We exploit a volcanic “experiment" to study the costs and benefits of geographic mobility. We show that moving costs (broadly defined) are very large and labor therefore does not flow to locations where it earns the highest returns. In our experiment, a third of the houses in a town were...

Existing theoretical models of intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic status have strong implications for the association of outcomes across multiple generations of a family. These models, however, are highly stylized and do not encompass many plausible avenues for transmission across...

Economists and social scientists have long been interested in intergenerational mobility, and documenting the persistence between parents and children's outcomes has been an active area of research. However, since Gary Solon's 1999 Chapter in the Handbook of Labor Economics, the literature has...

We introduce a general framework to analyze the trade-off between education and family size. Our framework incorporates parental preferences for birth order and delivers theoretically consistent birth order and family size effects on children's educational attainment. We develop an empirical...

Despite dramatic workforce gains by women in recent decades, a substantial gender earnings gap persists and widens over the course of men's and women's careers. Since there are earnings differences across establishments, a key question is the extent to which the widening of the gender pay gap...

We create a national-level longitudinal data set to analyze how children's participation in public and voucher-assisted housing affects age 26 earnings and adult incarceration. Naïve OLS estimates suggest that returns to subsidized housing participation are negative, but that relationship is...

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....

This paper deals with the labor market entrance of young people in the Federal Republic" of Germany. The main focus is on failures during this stage. First, an overview of the youth" labor market in Germany is given. Then, the transition from vocational training to work is" analyzed: The...

We explore the extent to which the huge race gap in wealth can be explained with properly constructed income and demographic variables. In some instances we explain the entire wealth gap with income and demographics provided that we estimate the wealth model on a sample of whites. However, we...