Social connections are fundamental to human wellbeing. This paper examines the social networks of young married women in rural Odisha, India. This is a group for whom highly-gendered norms around marriage, mobility and work are likely to shape opportunities to form and maintain meaningful ties...

Mexico's pioneering conditional cash transfer program Progresa, later renamed Prospera, operated over two decades in a shifting policy landscape. We exploit the program's sudden and unexpected rollback to estimate whether, two decades after rollout studies documented its initial impacts on...

This paper evaluates the Jumpstart Program (JSP), a parenting intervention implemented by a school district in the Houston area to enhance school readiness among economically disadvantaged three-year-old children. Unlike many early childhood programs typically tested in controlled research...

This paper develops and estimates a spatial general equilibrium job search model to study the effects of local and universal (federal) minimum wage policies on employment, wages, job postings, vacancies, migration/commuting, and welfare. In the model, workers, who differ in terms of location and...

This paper develops and applies semiparametric econometric methods to estimate the form of selection bias that arises from using nonexperimental comparison groups to evaluate social programs and to test the identifying assumptions that justify three widely-used classes of estimators and our...

In 1980, Chile dramatically reformed its retirement system, replacing what was an old insolvent PAYGO program with a new structure that relies heavily on funded defined contribution individual accounts. In addition, eligibility and benefit requirements were standardized, and a safety net for...

We examine a statewide program that identifies police departments with large racial disparities in traffic stops and works with identified departments to reduce disparities. The intervention caused large (23.56%) and persistent (at least 12 months) reductions in the number of minorities involved...

Conditional cash transfer programs have spread to over 80 countries in the past two decades, but little is known about their long-term effects on the youth they target. This paper estimates the impact of childhood exposure to the Mexican program Progresa on economic outcomes in early adulthood...

This paper considers the use of outcomes-based tests for detecting racial bias in the context of police searches of motor vehicles. It shows that the test proposed in Knowles, Persico and Todd (2001) can also be applied in a more general environment where police officers are heterogenous in...