We use administrative panel data on about a quarter of a million students in the German state of Hesse to estimate the causal effect of class size on school tracking outcomes after elementary school.Our identification strategy relies on the quasi-random assignment of students to different class...

This paper investigates the causes and effects of the spatial distribution of immigrants across US cities. We document that: a) immigrants concentrate in large, high-wage, and expensive cities, b) the earnings gap between immigrants and natives is higher in larger and more expensive cities, and...

Tougher immigration enforcement has been responsible for 1.8 million deportations between 2009 and 2013 alone, most of them involving fathers and heads of household. We exploit the geographic and temporal variation in intensified enforcement to gauge its impact on children's propensity to live...

The 1986 US Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) was directed at tackling the problem of growing unauthorized migration through legalization of unauthorized immigrants, increasing border security and sanctioning employers who hired unauthorized immigrants. Our paper investigates how the...

This paper aims to explain the slow economic convergence between groups of different ancestries in the US, i.e. why these groups experience even less intergenerational mobility than individuals in the same country. It shows how excessively persistent inequality may be a long-lasting outcome of...