Policymakers, public commentators, and researchers often cite the Nordic countries as examples of a social and economic model that successfully combines low income inequality with prosperity and growth. This article aims to critically assess this claim by integrating theoretical perspectives and...

The influence of peers could play an important role in the take up of social programs. However, estimating peer effects has proven challenging given the problems of reflection, correlated unobservables, and endogenous group membership. We overcome these identification issues in the context of...

Strong intergenerational correlations in various types of welfare use have fueled a long-standing debate over whether welfare receipt in one generation causes welfare participation in the next generation. Some claim a causal relationship in welfare receipt across generations has created a...

Recent changes in labor arrangements have increased interest in estimating and understanding the value of job flexibility. We leverage a large natural field experiment at Uber to create exogenous variation in expected market wages across individuals and over time. Combining this experiment with...

Policymakers, public commentators, and researchers often cite the Nordic countries as examples of a social and economic model that successfully combines low income inequality with prosperity and growth. This article aims to critically assess this claim by integrating theoretical perspectives and...

The foundations for successful child development are established in early childhood. Two main policy approaches for strengthening these foundations have been subsidized preschool programs and programs targeting the home environment. Our chapter reviews a large body of empirical work...

Many studies use matched employer-employee data to estimate a statistical model of earnings determination where log-earnings are expressed as the sum of worker effects, firm effects, covariates, and idiosyncratic error terms. Estimates based on this model have produced two influential yet...

Marginal treatment effect methods are widely used for causal inference and policy evaluation with instrumental variables. However, they fundamentally rely on the well-known monotonicity (threshold-crossing) condition on treatment choice behavior. Recent research has shown that this condition...

Economists are obsessed with rankings of institutions, journals, or scholars according to the value of some feature of interest. These rankings are invariably computed using estimates rather than the true values of such features. As a result, there may be considerable uncertainty concerning the...