We summarize the available evidence on the extent to which expenditures on early childhood education programs constitute worthy social investments in the human capital of children. We provide an overview of existing early childhood education programs, and then summarize results from a...

By collecting annual economic and demographic information from a large and representative sample of U.S. households for over a quarter century, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics has compiled a remarkably useful set of microdata. This article describes the PSID and how its unique longitudinal...

Randomized controlled trials are increasingly used to evaluate policies. How can we make these experiments as useful as possible for policy purposes? We argue greater use should be made of experiments that identify the behavioral mechanisms that are central to clearly specified policy questions,...