Research on the effects of prenatal care on birth outcomes has produced a patchwork of findings that are not easily summarized. Studies have used varying definitions of prenatal care, leading to estimates that are difficult to compare. The identification of causal effects is particularly...

Recent research documents a causal impact of place on the long-run outcomes of children. However, little is known about which neighborhood characteristics are most important, and at what scale neighborhood effects operate. By using the random assignment of public housing along with...

This paper provides the first estimates of the contemporaneous effect of drinking water quality violations on students' academic achievement. Using student-level test score data with residential addresses, geographic information on water systems, and drinking water violations from North...

Past work has documented significant occupational segregation between Black and white workers in the U.S. labor force. Little work, however, has examined racial occupational segregation in recent years or by levels of education and then at the intersection of education and race. In this paper,...

Poor post-secondary education infrastructure and opportunities partly explain the low higher education rates in developing countries. This paper estimates the effect of a program that improved post-secondary education infrastructure by building many university campuses across Uruguay. Leveraging...

We study the effects of job-protected leave policies on intergenerational mobility, long-run child outcomes, and parental decisions (labor market, investments in children, and fertility). We merge rich sources of historical information on family leave policies across the United States since 1973...

Decisions to invest in human capital depend on people's time preferences. We show that differences in patience are closely related to substantial subnational differences in educational achievement, leading to new perspectives on longstanding within-country disparities. We use social-media data -...

College-educated mothers spend substantially more time in intensive childcare than less educated mothers despite their higher opportunity cost of time and working more hours. Using data from the 2010-2013 and 2021 waves of the Well-being Module of the American Time Use Survey, we investigate...

The paper studies the impact of financial aid on long-term educational attainment and labor market outcomes in Colombia. In 2014, the government launched a large-scale and generous student loan program called "Ser Pilo Paga." It offered full tuition coverage to students admitted to one of 33...

To improve public services, public sector managers must encourage reticent civil servants to enact effective reforms. We show through a randomized controlled trial that school principals, i.e., school mangers, can act as leaders to improve Instructional Management (0.3SD) and student learning...