This paper examines New York City's Summer Youth Employment Program (SYEP). SYEP provides jobs to youth ages 14-24, and due to high demand for summer jobs, allocates slots through a random lottery system. We match student-level data from the SYEP program with educational records from the NYC...

I use administrative and survey data from Chile and a structural model to evaluate teacher policies in a market-based school system. The model accommodates equilibrium effects on parental sorting across school sectors (public or private), on the self-selection of individuals into teaching and...

This paper studies neighborhood effects using a dynamic general equilibrium model. Households choose where to live and how much to invest in their child's human capital. The return on parents' investment is determined in part by their child's ability and in part by a neighborhood externality. We...

Through certainty equivalent consumption (CE) measures, we show that dispersion of current earnings, expenditures, and net worth overstate welfare inequality. This is largely due to the unaccounted value of future earnings, which we call human wealth. The latter mitigates permanent-income...

We analyze the role of selection bias in generating changes in the observed distribution of female hourly wages in the United States using CPS data for the years 1975 to 2020. We account for selection bias from the employment decision by modeling the distribution of the number of working hours...

Researchers and policy makers have explored the possibility of restricting the use of housing vouchers to neighborhoods that may positively affect the outcomes of children. Using the framework of a dynamic model of optimal location choice, we estimate preferences over neighborhoods of likely...

How important to well-being is choosing a career with the right fit? We estimate a model of career choice in a setting where we observe the income risk of chosen careers and the risk aversion of the people who choose them. The key parameter of interest representing the importance of...

The Global Repository of Income Dynamics (GRID) is a new open-access, cross- country database that contains a wide range of micro statistics on income in- equality, dynamics, and mobility. It has four key characteristics: it is built on micro panel data drawn from administrative records; it...

We study the impact of child work on cognitive development in four Low- and Middle-Income Countries. We advance the literature by using cognitive test scores collected regardless of school attendance. We also address a key gap in the literature by controlling for children's complete time...