Recent years witnessed a flourishing of literature on the implication of shifts from home- production to market production on the macro economy, and in particular, the real business cycle. This literature employs calibration techniques to emulate the fluctuations in market output, labor and...

Peer effects have figured prominently in debates on school vouchers, desegregation, ability tracking and anti-poverty programs. Compelling evidence of their existence remains scarce for plaguing endogeneity issues such as selection bias and the reflection problem. This paper firmly establishes a...

Can efforts to promote education deter child labor? We report on the findings of a field experiment where a conditional transfer incentivized the schooling of children associated with carpet factories in Nepal. We find that schooling increases and child involvement in carpet weaving decreases...

We examine the first-order internal effects of unemployment on a range of health behaviors during the most recent recession using longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79). Consistent with prior studies based on...

We investigate the effects of broad-based work incentives on female crime by exploiting the welfare reform legislation of the 1990s, which dramatically increased employment among women at risk for relying on cash assistance. We find that welfare reform decreased female property crime arrests by...

This paper considers the potential relationship between providing care for grandchildren and retirement, among women nearing retirement age. Using 47,400 person-wave observations from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), we find the arrival of a new grandchild is associated with a more than...

While several types of mental illness, including substance abuse disorders, have been linked with poor labor market outcomes, no current research has been able to examine the effects of childhood ADHD. As ADHD has become one of the most prevalent childhood mental conditions, it is useful to...

We explore trends over time in the labor force participation of veterans and non-veterans and investigate whether these patterns are consistent with a rising role for the Veterans’ Affairs Disability Compensation (DC) program, which pays benefits to veterans with service-connected disabilities...

Attempting to shed light on the optimal size of government, economists have analyzed planning problems that specify a set of feasible taxation-spending policies and a social welfare function. The analysis characterizes the optimal policy choice of a planner who knows the welfare achieved by each...

The Internet has radically transformed the way we live our lives. The net changes in consumer surplus and economic activity, however, are difficult to measure because some online activities, such as obtaining news, are new ways of doing old activities while new activities, like social media,...