"This paper empirically assesses the incidence and efficiency of Round I of the federal urban Empowerment Zone (EZ) program using confidential microdata from the Decennial Census and the Longitudinal Business Database. To ground our welfare analysis, we develop a heterogeneous agent general...

We study how households choose neighborhoods, how neighborhoods affect child ability, and how housing vouchers influence neighborhood choices and child outcomes. We use two new panel data sets with tract-level detail for Los Angeles county to estimate a dynamic model of optimal tract-level...

We estimate the parameters of a dynamic, forward-looking neighborhood choice model in 197 metro areas where households have preferences over the racial composition of neighborhoods. Our inclusion of multiple metro areas in the estimation sample enables us to develop a new, shift-share IV...

This paper reviews the literature on firm wage differences and the fixed effects methods typically used to measure these differences. High wage firms tend to be more productive, larger, more sought after by workers, and to employ more credentialed and higher wage workers. The latest evidence...

We use census-like data and a regression discontinuity design to study the labor market impacts of a signal provided by a government-sponsored award given to top-performing students on a nationwide college exit exam in Colombia. Students who can signal their high level of specific skills earn...

This paper uses 113 household surveys from 18 Latin American countries to document patterns in secondary school graduation rates over the period 1990 2010. It is found that enrollment and graduation rates increased dramatically during that period, while dropout rates decreased. Two explanations...

We examine the long-term impacts of drought on local labor markets in Brazil. Us- ing rainfall data going back over a century, we build contemporaneous and historical drought indices for more than 3,000 local areas, and examine them in conjunction with five waves of population census data...