This chapter is a draft of Chapter 7 of a planned book, Preschool and Jobs: Human Development as Economic Development, and Vice Versa. This book analyzes early childhood programs’ effects on regional economic development. Four early childhood programs are considered: 1) universally accessible...

This paper is a draft of Chapter 8 of a planned book, Preschool and Jobs: Human Development as Economic Development, and Vice Versa. This book analyzes early childhood programs’ effects on regional economic development. Four early childhood programs are considered: 1) universally accessible...

Using a variance decomposition framework which provides bounds on the effect of families and neighbourhoods, we find important effects of family characteristics and residential location on educational attainment and adult earnings in Norway. Neighbourhoods are less important than families, as...

School quality is hard to define and measure. It is influenced by not only school expenditures, but also characteristics that are hard to measure like norms and peer effects among teachers and pupils. Furthermore, family background and community characteristics are important in explaining...

In 1968, the Taiwanese government extended compulsory education from 6 to 9 years and opened over 150 new junior high schools at a differential rate among regions. Within each region, we exploit variations across cohorts in new junior high school openings to construct an instrument for...

Harlem Children's Zone (HCZ), an ambitious social experiment, combines community programs with charter schools. We provide the first empirical test of the causal impact of HCZ charters on educational outcomes. Both lottery and instrumental variable identification strategies suggest that the...

This paper uses a new indicator to track poverty from 2001 to 2006 in small areas in Great Britain. The indicator, called Unadjusted Means-tested Benefits Rate (UMBR), was devised by Fenton (2013) and is the ratio of claimants of means tested benefits to the number of households in a small area....

This study aims to examine current land access and youth livelihood opportunities in Southern Ethiopia. Access to agricultural land is a constitutional right for rural residents of Ethiopia. We used survey data from the relatively land abundant districts of Oromia Region and from the land scarce...

To explain the links between population distribution and economic integration, we construct a spatial economics model with endogenous fertility. A higher population concentration increases real wages and child-raising costs, thus lowering the fertility rate. However, people migrate to more...