Most evaluations of education policies focus on their mean impacts; when distributional effects are investigated it is usually by comparing mean impacts across demographic subgroups. We argue that such estimates may overlook important treatment effect heterogeneity; in order to appreciate the...

We examine the effects of family structure on economic resources, controlling for unobservable family characteristics. In the year following a divorce, family income falls by 41 percent and family food consumption falls by 18 percent. Six or more years later, the family income of the average...

This study uses data on sisters and neighbouring girls in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to estimate sister and neighbour correlations in adult income. Our results suggest that the income resemblance between sisters stems more from growing up in the same family than from growing up in the...

This study proposes using correlations between neighboring children in their later socioeconomic status to bound the proportion of inequality in socioeconomic outcomes that can be attributed to disparities in neighborhood background. We apply this approach to educational attainment data from the...

Despite robust growth in real GDP per capita in the last three decades, U.S. poverty rates have changed very little. We summarize some basic facts about poverty in the United States, relying on a combination of previously published data from the Census Bureau and our own tabulations based on...

A comparison of the correlations between brothers and neighboring boys in their adult earnings suggests that the earnings resemblance between brothers stems more from growing up in the same family than from growing up in the same neighborhood. Much of the neighbor correlation is explicable in...