We use data on all middle and high school-aged children who survived a mass shooting incident on July 22, 2011 in Utoya, Norway, to understand how such events affect survivors, their families, and their peers. Using a difference-in-differences design to compare survivors to a matched control...

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...

Almost one third of women worldwide report some form of physical or sexual violence by a partner in their lifetime, yet little is known about the mental health and well-being effects for either victims or their children. We study the costs associated with domestic violence (DV) in the context of...

We document that the long-run economic benefits of a low-cost early-life health intervention transmit to later generations, but only for children of exposed mothers. We provide novel evidence that the program improved mothers' marriage outcomes but had limited effects on fathers' partnering...

This paper examines minority-white wage gaps. Neal and Johnson (1996) show that controlling for ability measured in the teenage years eliminates young adult wage gaps for all groups except for black males, for whom they eliminate 70% of the gap. Their study has been faulted because minority...

This paper uses factor models to identify and estimate distributions of counterfactuals. We extend LISREL frameworks to a dynamic treatment effect setting, extending matching to account for unobserved conditioning variables. Using these models, we can identify all pairwise and joint treatment...

This paper considers alternative policies for promoting skill formation that are targetted to different stages of the life cycle. We demonstrate the importance of both cognitive and noncognitive skills that are formed early in the life cycle in accounting for racial, ethnic and family background...

This paper studies how targeted cash transfers to women affect their empowerment. We use a novel identification strategy to measure women's willingness to pay to receive cash transfers instead of their partner receiving it. We apply this among women living in poor households in urban Macedonia....

The impact of school resources on the quality of education in developing countries may depend crucially on whether resources are targeted efficiently. In this paper we use a randomized experiment to analyze the impact of a school grants program in Senegal, which decentralized a portion of the...

This paper estimates the marginal returns to college for individuals induced to enroll in college by different marginal policy changes. The recent instrumental variables literature seeks to estimate this parameter, but in general it does so only under strong assumptions that are tested and found...