This study examines the effects of negative equity on children's academic performance, using data on children attending Florida public schools and housing transactions from the State of Florida. Our empirical strategy exploits variation over time in the timing of family moves to Florida in order...

Holding a summer job is a rite of passage in American adolescence, a first rung towards adulthood and self-sufficiency. Summer youth employment has the potential to benefit high school students' educational outcomes and employment trajectories, especially for low-income youth. This paper...

We investigate the role of information frictions in the US labor market using a new nationally representative panel dataset on individuals' labor market expectations and realizations. We find that expectations about future job offers are, on average, highly predictive of actual outcomes. Despite...

This paper studies how individuals "believe" human capital investments will affect their future career and family life. We conducted a survey of high-ability currently enrolled college students and elicited beliefs about how their choice of college major, and whether to complete their degree at...

We develop a new estimator for the process of children's skill formation in which children's skills endogenously develop according to a dynamic latent factor structure. Rather than assuming skills are measured perfectly by a particular measure, we accommodate the variety of skills measures used...

A recent and growing area of research applies latent factor models to study the development of children's skills. Some normalization is required in these models because the latent variables have no natural units and no known location or scale. We show that the standard practice of...

In this paper, we use a hypothetical choice methodology to robustly estimate preferences for workplace attributes and quantify how much these preferences influence pre-labor market human capital investments. Undergraduate students are presented with sets of job offers that vary in their...

This paper combines multiple sources of information on early childhood development in a unified model for analysis of a wide range of early childhood policy interventions. We develop a model of child care in which households decide both the quantities and qualities of maternal and non-maternal...

We construct and estimate a model of child development in which both the parents and children make investments in the child's skill development. In each period of the development process, partially altruistic parents act as the Stackelberg leader and the child the follower when setting her own...

Using every major nationally-representative dataset on parental and non-parental care provided to children up to age 6, we quantify differences in American children's care experiences by socioeconomic status (SES), proxied primarily with maternal education. Increasingly, higher-SES children...