Using a discontinuity in the funding scheme, we evaluate the impact of home visits and child care centers on poor children and mothers in Ecuador. We find that home visits are beneficial for children's cognitive outcomes and health and for mothers' psychological well-being but reduce mothers'...

When workers' investments in firm-specific skills are non-contractible underinvestment may occur because of holdup. Up-or-out contracts can potentially solve this problem by limiting the firm's scope for opportunistic behavior. The downside of such contracts is that a worker who does not make...

This paper presents evidence about the impact on school enrollment of a program in Ecuador that gives cash transfers to the 40 percent poorest families. The evaluation design consists of a randomized experiment for families around the first quintile of the poverty index and of a regression...

Standard economic theory predicts that firms will not invest in general training and will underinvest in specific training. Empirical evidence indicates, however, that firms do invest in general training of their workers and also points to no underinvestment in specific training. We propose a...

This paper uses administrative data from 16 cohorts of the Dutch population to study the relationship between field of study and family outcomes. We first document considerable variation by field of study for a range of family outcomes. To get to causal effects, we use admission lotteries that...