Governments invest a lot of money in education, so it is important to understand the benefits of this spending. One essential aspect is that education can potentially make people better parents and thus improve the educational and employment outcomes of their children. Interventions that...

From 1995 to 2015, the aggregate college completion rate in the US increased from 22.9% to 33.5%. Yet, completion trends differed markedly for individuals from different family backgrounds. This paper considers the extent to which trends in college preparedness contributed to the growth in...

We exploit the phase-out of leaded gasoline to isolate the impact of early childhood lead exposure on outcomes in adulthood. By combining administrative data on school performance, high school graduation, crime, earnings, and cognitive and non-cognitive skills with a novel measure of lead...