Raising a new-born child involves not only financial resources, but also time investment from the parents. A time constraint can affect important decisions made by parents at the early stages of an infant's life. One form of investment that is particularly important is vaccinating an infant. We...

The Short-Time Compensation (STC) program enables US firms to reduce work hours via pro-rated Unemployment Insurance (UI) benefits, rather than relying on layoffs as a cost-cutting tool. Despite the program's potential to preclude skill loss and rehiring/ retraining costs, firms' participation...

This paper relaxes the assumption of homogeneous rates of return to schooling by employing nonparametric kernel regression. This approach allows us to examine the differences in rates of return to education both across and within groups. Similar to previous studies we find that on average blacks...

This paper proposes a new strategy to identify causal effects. Instead of finding a conventional instrumental variable correlated with the treatment but not with the confounding effects, we propose an approach which employs an instrument correlated with the confounders, but which itself is not...

This paper examines the long-term health impact of Agent Orange, a toxic military herbicide containing dioxin that was used extensively during the U.S.-Vietnam war in the 1960-70s. Using a nationally representative health survey and an instrumental variable approach that addresses the potential...

Some interventions or population attributes negate the effects of a treatment. This paper shows that incorporating these, what we call antidotal variables (AV), into a causal treatment effects analysis can with one cross-sectional regression identify the true causal effect, in addition to...

This paper shows how a shorter fecundity horizon for females (a biological constraint) leads to age and educational disparities between husbands and wives. Empirical support is based on data from a natural experiment commencing before and ending after China's 1980 one-child law. The results...

The gender wage gap varies across countries. For example, among OECD nations women in Australia, Belgium, Italy and Sweden earn 80% as much as males, whereas in Austria, Canada and Japan women earn about 60%. Current studies examining cross-country differences focus on the impact of labor market...

Data from the first two waves of the Fragile Family and Child Wellbeing study indicate that infants who look like their father at birth are healthier one year later. The reason is such father-child resemblance induces a father to spend more time engaged in positive parenting. An extra day (per...

This paper examines how human capital based approaches explain the distribution of earnings. It assesses traditional, quasi-experimental, and new micro-based structural models, the latter of which gets at population heterogeneity by estimating individual-specific earnings function parameters....