What do the education premiums look like over the life cycle? What is the impact of schooling on lifetime earnings? How does the internal rate of return compare with opportunity cost of funds? To what extent do progressive taxes attenuate the incentives to invest in education? This paper...

Using quasi-random assignment of criminal cases to judges, we estimate large incarceration spillovers in criminal and brother networks. When a defendant is sent to prison, there are 51 and 32 percentage point reductions in the probability his criminal network members and younger brothers will be...

Understanding whether, and in what situations, time spent in prison is criminogenic or preventive has proven challenging due to data availability and correlated unobservables. This paper overcomes these challenges in the context of Norway's criminal justice system, offering new insights into how...

An often overlooked population in discussions of prison reform is the children of inmates. How a child is affected depends both on what incarceration does to their parent and what they learn from their parent's experience. To overcome endogeneity concerns, we exploit the random assignment of...

The social and the private returns to education differ when education can increase productivity, and also be used to signal productivity. We show how instrumental variables can be used to separately identify and estimate the social and private returns to education within the employer learning...

We propose a method for using instrumental variables (IV) to draw inference about causal effects for individuals other than those affected by the instrument at hand. Policy relevance and external validity turns on the ability to do this reliably. Our method exploits the insight that both the IV...

There is no evaluation of the consequences of Disability Insurance (DI) receipt that captures the effects on households' net income and consumption expenditure, family labor supply, or benefits from other programs. Combining detailed register data from Norway with an instrumental variables...

We use Belgian data with information on domestic firm-to-firm sales and foreign trade transactions to study how international trade affects firms' unit cost and the consumer's real wage. We show theoretically that the gains from trade depend on domestic firm-to-firm linkages. Furthermore, we...

Empirical researchers often combine multiple instrumental variables (IVs) for a single treatment using two-stage least squares (2SLS). When treatment effects are heterogeneous, a common justification for including multiple IVs is that the 2SLS estimand can be given a causal interpretation as a...

High school vocational education has a controversial history in the United States, largely due to a perceived tradeoff between teaching readily deployable occupational skills versus shunting mostly disadvantaged students away from the educational and career flexibility afforded by general...