Fueled by new evidence, there has been renewed interest about the effects of birth order on human capital accumulation. The underlying causal mechanisms for such effects remain unsettled. We consider a model in which parents impose more stringent disciplinary environments in response to their...

Fueled by new evidence, there has been renewed interest about the effects of birth order on human capital accumulation. The underlying causal mechanisms for such effects remain unsettled. We consider a model in which parents impose more stringent disciplinary environments in response to their...

This paper examines the short and long-run average causal impact of catastrophic natural disasters on economic growth by combining information from comparative case studies. The counterfactual of the cases studied is assessed by constructing synthetic control groups, taking advantage of the fact...

We examine the average causal impact of catastrophic natural disasters on economic growth by combining information from comparative case studies. For each country affected by a large disaster, we compute the counterfactual by constructing synthetic controls. We find that only extremely large...

We quantify the impact of abortion legalization on the incidence of unintended births. While underlying much of the literature on abortion legalization, this effect had only been approximated by previous work. We find a strong decline in the prevalence of unintended births. Moreover, we find...

The Social Security Administration computes individual pension benefits using the average survival in the population. However, less educated individuals, and those with lower lifetime incomes, have lower life expectancies than their more educated and richer counterparts. We investigate how...

We introduce a novel approach to allow for unobserved heterogeneity in two-step structural estimation strategies for discrete choice dynamic programming models (i.e strategies that avoid full solution methods). We contribute to the literature by adopting a fiÂ…xed effects approach: rather...

Over the last several years highly accurate methods of gender selection before conception have been developed. Given that strong preferences for gender variety in offspring have been documented for the U.S. We move beyond bio-ethical and moral considerations and ask what the demographic...