Using four decades of variation in the federal and state Earned Income Tax Credit, we estimate the impact of the EITC on education and employment outcomes on children exposed to EITC expansions in childhood. Reduced-form results suggest that an additional $1,000 in EITC exposure when a child is...

We consider a general framework to study the evolution of wage and earnings residuals that incorporates features highlighted by two influential but distinct literatures in economics: (i) unobserved skills with changing non-linear pricing functions and (ii) idiosyncratic shocks that follow a rich...

This paper discusses the relationship between education and crime from an economic perspective, developing a human capital-based model that sheds light on key ways in which early childhood programs and policies that encourage schooling may affect both juvenile and adult crime. The paper first...

This paper shows that repeated cross-section data with multiple skill measures (one continuous and repeated) available each period are sufficient to nonparametrically identify the evolution of skill returns and cross-sectional skill distributions. With panel data and the same available...

The canonical supply{demand model of the wage returns to skill has been extremely in uential; however, it has faced several important challenges. Several studies show that the standard approach sometimes produces theoretically wrong-signed elasticities of substitution, yields counterintuitive...

Economists disagree about the factors driving the substantial increase in residual wage inequality in the U.S. over the past few decades. We identify and estimate a general model of log wage residuals that incorporates: (i) changing returns to unobserved skills, (ii) a changing distribution of...