Between 1996 and 1998 California and Texas eliminated the use of affirmative action in college and university admissions. At the states' elite public universities admission rates of black and Hispanic students fell by 30-50 percent and minority representation in the entering freshman classes...

How has publishing in top economics journals changed since 1970? Using a data set that combines information on all articles published in the top-5 journals from 1970 to 2012 with their Google Scholar citations, we identify nine key trends. First, annual submissions to the top-5 journals nearly...

When wage contracts are relatively short-lived, rent sharing may reduce the incentives for investment since some of the returns to sunk capital are captured by workers. In this paper we use a matched worker-firm data set from the Veneto region of Italy that combines Social Security earnings...

Family violence is a pervasive and costly problem, yet there is no consensus on how to interpret the phenomenon of violence by one family member against another. Some analysts assume that violence has an instrumental role in intra-family incentives. Others argue that violent episodes represent a...

This paper presents a meta-analysis of recent microeconometric evaluations of active labor market policies. Our sample contains 199 separate "program estimates" - estimates of the impact of a particular program on a specific subgroup of participants - drawn from 97 studies conducted between 1995...

We use a simple theoretical framework and a randomized manipulation of access to information on peers' wages to provide new evidence on the effects of relative pay on individual job satisfaction and job search intentions. A randomly chosen subset of employees of the University of California (UC)...

We propose a new classification of experiments that captures the extent to which the experimental design and analysis are linked to economic theory. We then use this system to classify all published field experiments in the five top economics journals from 1975 to 2010. We find that the vast...

We study social interactions in the risky behavior of best-friend pairs in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). Focusing on friends who had not yet initiated a particular behavior (sex, smoking, marijuana use, truancy) by the first wave of the survey, we estimate...

We provide new evidence on the effect of the unemployment insurance (UI) weekly benefit amount on unemployment insurance spells based on administrative data from the state of Missouri covering the period 2003-2013. Identification comes from a regression kink design that exploits the...

We study the role of establishment-specific wage premiums in generating recent increases in West German wage inequality. Models with additive fixed effects for workers and establishments are fit in four distinct time intervals spanning the period 1985-2009. Unlike standard wage models,...