This paper explores the aggregate economic effects from India's National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS), which provides up to 100 days of labor to rural laborers at the mandated minimum wage. We examine the within-district change to night-time lights and banking deposits using the...

We revisit the idea that colonized countries that were more (less) economically advanced in 1500 became poorer (richer, respectively) by the late 20th century. Using data on place of origin of today's country populations and the urbanization and population density measures used by Acemoglu et...

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of a widely used sanitation intervention, Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS), using a randomized controlled trial. The intervention was implemented at scale across rural East Java in Indonesia. CLTS increases toilet construction, reduces roundworm...

We test if there is a differential in early child development by handedness, using a comprehensive range of measures covering, learning, social, cognitive and language skills, evaluated by both interviewer conducted tests and teacher assessments. We find robust evidence that left-handed children...

We estimate the effect of early child development on maternal labor force participation using data from teacher assessments. Mothers might react to having a poorly developing child by dropping out of the formal labor force in order to spend more time with their child, or they could potentially...

Using data from the US National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, and fitting family fixed-effects models of child health and cognitive development, we test if left-handed children do significantly worse than their right-handed counterparts. The health measures cover both physical and mental health,...

We estimate the earnings premium for beauty in an occupation where returns to physical attractiveness are likely to be important: commercial sex work. In the commercial sex market, perhaps more so than any other sector in the labor market, the beauty premium should be at the extreme due to the...

Do parents invest more or less in their high ability children? We provide new evidence on this question by comparing observed ability differences and observed investment differences between siblings in the NLSY. To overcome endogeneity issues we use sibling differences in handedness as an...

Higher wages are generally thought to increase human capital production, particularly in the developing world. We introduce a simple model of human capital production in which investments and time allocation differ by age. Using data on test scores and schooling from rural India, we show that...

We examine the effect of India's National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS), one of the largest workfare programs in the world, on human capital investment. Since NREGS increases labor demand, it could increase the opportunity cost of schooling, lowering human capital investment even as...