Using personnel data from a large U.S. retail firm, we examine whether the race of the hiring manager affects the racial composition of new hires. We exploit manager changes at hundreds of stores to estimate models with store fixed effects. We find significant effects of manager race and...

Using personnel data from a large U.S. retail firm with more than 700 stores nationwide, this study examines how the 1996 federal minimum wage increase affected both the level of employment at each store and also the fraction of teenagers employed. Because the minimum wage caused the relative...

This paper examines the macroeconomic and welfare implications of alternative re- forms to the U.S. health insurance system. In particular, I study the effect of the expansion of Medicare to the entire population, the expansion of Medicaid, an individ- ual mandate, the removal of the tax break...

This paper considers a simulation-based estimator for a general class of Markovian processes and explores some strong consistency properties of the estimator. These results are of interest for various kinds of simulation-based estimation methods typically used in economics and finance. The...

This study examines the causal link between parental non-marital relationship dissolution and the health status of young children. Using a representative sample of children all born out of wedlock drawn from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, we investigate whether separation...

This study examines the effects of the relationship structure between biological parents on infant health and behavior using a sample of children born to unmarried parents in the United States. Using descriptive and multivariate analysis, we find that: (1) There is no difference in child...

Estimation of average treatment effects under unconfounded or ignorable treatment assignment is often hampered by lack of overlap in the covariate distributions. This lack of overlap can lead to imprecise estimates and can make commonly used estimators sensitive to the choice of specification....

Using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, this paper examines why married parents of boys are less likely than parents of girls to become separated or divorced. Two prominent theories attribute differential divorce rates to: (1) the fathers’ preferences for sons; or (2)...

Countries that wish to erect trade barriers have a variety of instruments at their disposal. In addition to tariffs and quotas, countries can offer tax relief, low interest financing, reduced regulation, and other subsidies to domestic industries facing foreign competition. In a trade agreement,...

Trends in gross domestic product (GDP) and total factor productivity (TFP) growth in the former socialist economies seem to indicate that these economies were converging to unusually low long-run growth rates in the late 1980s. In this paper we develop an endogenous growth model of...