For decades, the prevailing sentiment among economists was that growth rates remain constant over the long run. Kaldor considered this to be one of the six important 'stylized facts' that theory should address, and until the emergence of endogenous growth models, this was a fundamental feature...

We document substantial within-country (cross-municipality) differences in incomes for a large number of countries in the Americas. A significant fraction of the within-country differences cannot be explained by observed human capital. We conjecture that the sources of within-country and...

We examine the relationship between urban characteristics in 1960 and urban growth (income and population) between 1960 and 1990. Our major findings are that income and population growth move together and both types of growth are (1) positively related to initial schooling, (2) negatively...

This paper provides empirical evidence of an established theoretical result: in the presence of heterogeneous treatment effects, OLS is generally not a consistent estimator of the sample-weighted average treatment effect (SWE). We propose two alternative estimators that do recover the SWE in the...

The 2005 split-share reform in China mandated the conversion of nontradable stocks into tradable status. This paper examines the effects of stock markets on corporate outcomes exploiting multiple institutional features of the Chinese conversion program. Using a generalized propensity score...

This paper builds on the methods of local instrumental variables developed by Heckman and Vytlacil (1999, 2001, 2005) to estimate person-centered treatment (PeT) effects that are conditioned on the person's observed characteristics and averaged over the potential conditional distribution of...

This paper studies the effect of mandated employer-provided child care on the wages of women hired in large firms in Chile. We use a unique employer-employee database from the country's unemployment insurance (UI) system containing monthly information for all individuals that started a new...

This study uses Monte Carlo simulations to demonstrate that regression-discontinuity designs arrive at biased estimates when attributes related to outcomes predict heaping in the running variable. After showing that our usual diagnostics are poorly suited to identifying this type of problem, we...

Researchers have long used repeated cross sectional observations of homicide rates and sanctions to examine the deterrent effect of the adoption and implementation of death penalty statutes. The empirical literature, however, has failed to achieve consensus. A fundamental problem is that the...

While the rise in childhood obesity is clear, the policy ramifications are not. School nutrition programs such as the School Breakfast Program (SBP) have come under much scrutiny. However, the lack of experimental evidence, combined with non-random selection into these programs, makes...