Education and health care are the two largest government expenditure items in the United States. The public sector directly provides the majority of educational services, through the public school bureaucracy, while most public support for health care is channelled through a system of...

A growing body of work suggests that education offers a wide-range of benefits that extend beyond increases in labor market productivity. Improvements in education can lower crime, improve health, and increase voting and democratic participation. This chapter reviews recent developments on these...

Scholars have long speculated about education's political impacts, variously arguing that it promotes modern or pro-democratic attitudes; that it instills acceptance of existing authority; and that it empowers the disadvantaged to challenge authority. To avoid endogeneity bias, if schooling...

We conduct a comparative welfare analysis of 133 historical policy changes over the past half-century in the United States, focusing on policies in social insurance, education and job training, taxes and cash transfers, and in-kind transfers. For each policy, we use existing causal estimates to...

Pathways to Education is a comprehensive youth support program developed to improve academic outcomes among those entering high school from very poor social-economic backgrounds. The program includes proactive mentoring to each student, daily tutoring, group activities, career counseling, and...

This paper investigates how accountability pressures under No Child Left Behind (NCLB) may affect children's rate of overweight. Schools facing increased pressures to produce academic outcomes may reallocate their efforts in ways that have unintended consequences for children's health. For...

The goal of federal food and nutrition programs in the United States is to improve the nutritional well-being and health of low income families. A large body of literature evaluates the extent to which the Supplemental Program for Women Infants and Children (WIC) has accomplished this goal, but...

I investigate why the United States did not adopt European style health insurance in the 1910s by examining voting determinants on the 1918 referendum on state-provided health insurance in California. I find that although the persuasiveness of interest groups, especially doctors, was an...

We evaluate the impact of government mandated proof of vaccination requirements for access to public venues and non-essential businesses on COVID-19 vaccine uptake. We find that the announcement of a mandate is associated with a rapid and significant surge in new vaccinations (more than 60\%...

We usually consider it progress when a country begins to shift from an autocratic to a democratic form of government. However, the introduction of elections and other early trappings of democracy often has the perverse effect of exacerbating political instability. It also increases the...