This paper presents new evidence on international trade and worker outcomes. It examines a big world event that produced an unprecedentedly large shock to the UK exchange rate. In the 24 hours in June 2016 during which the UK electorate unexpectedly voted to leave the European Union, the value...

Low-performing, high-poverty, public schools notoriously struggle to attract and retain good teachers. This paper studies a setting where independent organizations, including charities and businesses, take over the management of under-performing schools, while funding remains public. Exploiting...

We compare predictions from a conventional protocol-based approach to risk assessment with those based on a machine-learning approach. We first show that the conventional predictions are less accurate than, and have similar rates of negative prediction error as, a simple Bayes classifier that...

Domestic abuse is a pervasive global problem. Here we analyze two approaches to reducing violent DA recidivism. One involves charging the perpetrator with a crime; the other provides protective services to the victim on the basis of a formal risk assessment carried out by the police. We use...

We provide descriptive evidence from Miami-Dade County (MDC), FL and from five representative areas in Massachusetts (MA) that government policies governing welfare reform, the child-care subsidy system and minimum-standards regulation have had considerable impact on the availability, price, and...

In this paper, we consider a number of issues regarding crime prevention and criminal justice. We begin by considering how crime is measured and present both general and specific evidence on the level of crime in a variety of countries. Crime is pervasive and varies substantially across...

We assess the role of child care in the welfare to work transition using an unusually large and comprehensive data base. Our data are for Massachusetts, a state that began welfare reform in 1995 under a federal waiver, for the period July 1996 through August 1997. We find that both the nature of...

Crime, Imprisonment, and Female Labor Force Participation: A Time-Series Approach Robert Witt and Ann Dryden Witte NBER Working Paper No. 6786 November 1998 JEL No. K14, H0 Rapidly growing prison population in the US has led to an upsurge of interest in discerning the impact of this costly...

This study examines the variation in educational outcomes across and within countries using the TIMSS mathematics tests. It documents the wide cross-country variation in the level and dispersion of test scores. Countries with the highest test scores are those with the least inequality in scores,...

Although there is a large literature on the economic effects of minimum wages on labour market outcomes (especially employment), there is much less evidence on their impact on firm performance. In this paper we consider a very under-studied area - the impact of minimum wages on firm...