This paper provides evidence on the returns to schooling in current and lifetime earnings. We use these results to assess the importance of life-cycle bias in earnings regressions using current earnings as proxy for lifetime earnings. To account for the endogeneity of schooling, we apply three...

What do the education premiums look like over the life cycle? What is the impact of schooling on lifetime earnings? How does the internal rate of return compare with opportunity cost of funds? To what extent do progressive taxes attenuate the incentives to invest in education? This paper...

Using quasi-random assignment of criminal cases to judges, we estimate large incarceration spillovers in criminal and brother networks. When a defendant is sent to prison, there are 51 and 32 percentage point reductions in the probability his criminal network members and younger brothers will be...

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...

Does prison cause mental health problems among inmates and their family members? Correlational evidence reveals that the prevalence of mental health problems is much higher among inmates than among the general population, but remains silent on the issue of causality. We exploit the strengths of...

We demonstrate how age-adjusted inequality measures can be used to evaluate whether changes in inequality over time are because of changes in the age structure. In particular, we explore the hypothesis that the substantial rise in earnings inequality since the early 1980s is driven by the large...

There is relatively little research on peer effects in teenage motherhood despite the fact that peer effects, and in particular social interaction within the family, are likely to be important. We estimate the impact of an elder sister’s teenage fertility on the teenage childbearing of their...

Older workers typically possess older vintages of skills than younger workers, and they may suffer more from technological change. Experienced workers never the less have accumulated human capital that make them suitable for adopting new technologies. On the other hand, to adjust to new...

Despite important policy implications associated with the allocation of education resources, evidence on the effectiveness of school inputs remains inconclusive. In part, this is due to endogenous allocation; families sort themselves non-randomly into school districts and school districts...

Job reallocation is considered to be a key characteristic of well-functioning labor markets, as more productive firms grow and less productive ones contract or close. However, despite its potential benefits for the economy, there are significant costs that are borne by displaced workers. We...