The relationships between social networks and economic behavior have been well-documented. However, it is often difficult to distinguish between the role of information sharing and other features of a neighborhood, such as factors that are common to people of the same ethnicities or...

Analyzing Florida birth certificates matched to school records, we document that the female advantage in childhood behavioral and academic outcomes is driven by gender gaps at the extremes of the outcome distribution. Using unconditional quantile regression, we investigate whether family...

We make use of a new data resource, merged birth and school records for all children born in Florida from 1992 to 2002, to study the effects of birth weight on cognitive development from kindergarten through schooling. Using twin fixed effects models, we find that the effects of birth weight on...

It is notoriously difficult to identify peer effects within the family, because of the common shocks and reflection problems. We make use of a novel identification strategy and unique data in order to gain some purchase on this problem. We employ data from the universe of children born in...

Birth order has been found to have a surprisingly large influence on educational attainment, yet much less is known about the role of birth order on delinquency outcomes such as disciplinary problems in school, juvenile delinquency, and adult crime: outcomes that carry significant negative...

Recent evidence indicates that boys and girls are differently affected by the quantity and quality of family inputs received in childhood. We assess whether this is also true for schooling inputs. Using matched Florida birth and school administrative records, we estimate the causal effect of...

The relationships between social networks and economic behavior have been well-documented. However, it is often difficult to distinguish between the role of information sharing and other features of a neighborhood, such as factors that are common to people of the same ethnicities or...

We study the effects of prenatal receipt of nutritional and educational services provided by the Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) on birth outcomes. Our identification strategy consists of two elements: (1) identifying families in a very tight income range...