The foundations for successful child development are established in early childhood. Two main policy approaches for strengthening these foundations have been subsidized preschool programs and programs targeting the home environment. Our chapter reviews a large body of empirical work...

Previous research has demonstrated that attending center care is associated with cognitive benefits for young children. However, little is known about the ideal age for children to enter such care or the "right" amount of time, both weekly and yearly, for children to attend center programs....

Young children in poor communities are spending more hours in non-parental care due to policy reforms and expansion of early childhood programs. Studies show positive effects of high-quality center-based care on children's cognitive growth. Yet we know little about the effects of center care...

Using quasi-random assignment of criminal cases to judges, we estimate large incarceration spillovers in criminal and brother networks. When a defendant is sent to prison, there are 51 and 32 percentage point reductions in the probability his criminal network members and younger brothers will be...

Understanding whether, and in what situations, time spent in prison is criminogenic or preventive has proven challenging due to data availability and correlated unobservables. This paper overcomes these challenges in the context of Norway's criminal justice system, offering new insights into how...

Strong intergenerational correlations in various types of welfare use have fueled a long-standing debate over whether welfare receipt in one generation causes welfare participation in the next generation. Some claim a causal relationship in welfare receipt across generations has created a...