One-third of children in the United States are born to unmarried parents. A substantial number of black and Hispanic children live with a never-married mother. Children of never-married mothers are more likely to drop out of high school, repeat grades, and have behavioral problems than are...

Since 1997, states have begun to make criminal history records publicly available over the Internet. This paper exploits this previously unexamined variation to identify the effect of expanded employer access to criminal history data on the labor market outcomes of ex-offenders and...

Microeconomic data often have within-cluster dependence. This dependence affects standard error estimation and inference in regression models, including the instrumental variables model. Standard corrections assume that the number of clusters is large, but when this is not the case, Wald and...

Never-married motherhood is associated with worse educational outcomes for children. But this association may reflect other factors that also determine family structure, rather than causal effects. We use incarceration rates for men as instrumental variables in estimating the effect of...

Foster care caseloads have almost doubled over the last two decades, but the cause of the growth is poorly understood. We study the role of parental methamphetamine (meth) use, which social workers have linked to recent growth in foster care admissions. To mitigate the impact of omitted variable...

In this paper, we examine the distributional effects of tax evasion, using results from theoretical, experimental, empirical, and especially the general equilibrium literatures on tax evasion. Much, if not all, of this evidence concludes that the main beneficiaries of successful tax evasion are...

The optimality of supply interventions for addictive drugs is a function of demand responses to price, enforcement costs, and the relative size of external costs. Researchers need credible estimates of demand responses, but most research designs use price series affected by law enforcement...