A large theoretical and empirical literature explores whether politicians and political parties change their policy positions in response to voters' preferences. This paper asks the opposite question: do political parties affect public attitudes on important policy issues? Problems of reverse...

To what degree do economists disagree about key economic questions? To provide evidence, we make use of the responses to a series of questions posed to a distinguished panel of economists put together by the Chicago School of Business. Based on our analysis, we find a broad consensus on these...

How schooling affects cognitive skills is a fundamental question for studies of human capital and labor markets. While scores on cognitive ability tests are positively associated with schooling, it has proven difficult to ascertain whether this relationship is causal. Moreover, the effect of...

Strong intergenerational correlations in various types of welfare use have fueled a long-standing debate over whether welfare receipt in one generation causes welfare participation in the next generation. Some claim a causal relationship in welfare receipt across generations has created a...

Paid maternity leave has gained greater salience in the past few decades as mothers have increasingly entered the workforce. Indeed, the median number of weeks of paid leave to mothers among OECD countries was 14 in 1980, but had risen to 42 by 2011. We assess the case for paid maternity leave,...

The influence of peers could play an important role in the take up of social programs. However, estimating peer effects has proven challenging given the problems of reflection, correlated unobservables, and endogenous group membership. We overcome these identification issues in the context of...

Do the parties in a typical dispute face incentives similar to those in the classic prisoner's dilemma game? In this paper, we explore whether the costs and benefits of legal representation are such that each party seeks legal representation in the hope of exploiting the other party, while...

This paper shows how parental preferences for sons versus daughters affect divorce, child custody, marriage, shotgun marriage when the sex of the child is known before birth, and fertility stopping rules. We document that parents with girls are significantly more likely to be divorced, that...

Understanding the consequences of growing up poor for a child's well-being is an important research question, but one that is difficult to answer due to the potential endogeneity of family income. Past estimates of the effect of family income on child development have often been plagued by...

In this paper we study the complete evolution of a final-offer arbitration system used in New Jersey with data we have systematically collected over the 18-year life of the program. Covering the wages of police officers and firefighters, this system provides virtually a laboratory setting for...