National paid family leave programs have been repeatedly proposed in the United States in recent years. To inform policy discussions, we provide a benefit-cost analysis of introducing such a program. We systematically identify high-quality, quasi-experimental studies on the impact of paid leave...

By the end of the Civil War, 186,017 black men had fought for the Union Army and roughly three-quarters of these men were former slaves. Because most of the black soldiers who served were illiterate farm workers, the war exposed them to a much broader world. The war experience of these men...

This article reviews the literature on the cost of U.S. post-War business cycle fluctuations. I argue that recent work has established this cost is considerably larger than initial work found. However, despite the large cost of macroeconomic volatility, it is not obvious that policymakers should...

There is renewed interest in ways to enhance secondary education, especially among disadvantaged students. This study evaluates the short-term effects of a remedial-education program that provided additional instruction to under-performing high-school students in Israel. The program targeted...

In this paper we show that omitted variables and publication bias lead to severely biased estimates of the value of a statistical life. Although our empirical results are obtained in the context of a study of choices about road safety, we suspect that the same issues plague the estimation of...

The British New Deal for Young People began in January 1998. After 6 months of unemployment, 18-24 year olds are mandated to enter a `Gateway' period where they are given extensive job search assistance. If they are unable to obtain an unsubsidised job, then they can enter one of four New Deal...

We analyze in this paper the long term effect of a high school remedial education program, almost two decades after its implementation. We combine high school records with National Social Security administrative data to examine longer-term outcomes when students were in their early 30s. Our...

Government analysts have long used discount rates based on investment rates of return to approximate the effect of capital displacement. However, we show how this approach is not well grounded in economic theory and produces highly biased results, particularly in the context of decisions...

We demonstrate the social efficiency of investing in high-quality early childhood education using newly collected data from the HighScope Perry Preschool Project. The data analyzed are the longest follow-up of any randomized early childhood education program. Annual observations of participant...

In 2021, the Biden Administration issued mandates requiring COVID-19 vaccinations for U.S. federal employees and contractors and for some healthcare and private sector workers. Although these mandates have been subject to legal challenges and some have been halted or delayed, rigorous appraisal...