We quantify agglomeration spillovers by estimating the impact of the opening of a large new manufacturing plant on the total factor productivity (TFP) of incumbent plants in the same county. Articles in the corporate real estate journal Site Selection reveal the county where the "Million Dollar...

A large literature has documented a signi cant increase in the return to college over the past 30 years. This increase is typically measured using nominal wages. I show that from 1980 to 2000, college graduates have increasingly concentrated in metropolitan areas that are characterized by a high...

This paper shows how parental preferences for sons versus daughters affect divorce, child custody, marriage, shotgun marriage when the sex of the child is known before birth, and fertility stopping rules. We document that parents with girls are significantly more likely to be divorced, that...

Economists have speculated for at least a century that the social return to education may exceed the private return. In this paper, I estimate spillovers from college education by comparing wages for otherwise similar individuals who work in cities with different shares of college graduates in...

Families in developing countries face enormous financial risks from major illness both in terms of the cost of medical care and the loss in income associated with reduced labor supply and productivity. We test whether access to microfinancial savings and lending institutions helps Indonesian...

There are two fundamentally different views of the role of elections in policy formation. In one view, voters can affect candidates' policy choices: competition for votes induces politicians to move toward the center. In this view, elections have the effect of bringing about some degree of...

Economists have long speculated that individuals care about both their absolute income and their income relative to others. 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...

More than 80% of Italian men aged 18–30 live with their parents.We argue that one contributing factor to this remarkably high rate of cohabitation is parents' tastes for coresidence. In order to investigate the role of parental preferences, we estimate the effect of exogenous changes in...

We examine the effect of maternal education on birth outcomes using Vital Statistics Natality data for 1970 to 1999. We also assess the importance of four channels through which maternal education may improve birth outcomes: use of prenatal care, smoking, marriage, and fertility. In an effort to...