This study investigates how being exposed to a field of study influences students' major choices. We exploit a natural experiment at a Swiss university where all first-year students face largely the same curriculum before they choose a major. An important component of the first-year curriculum...

The authors estimate the short-run and life-cycle effects of unplanned children on unwed mothers by comparing unmarried women who first gave birth to twins with unwed mothers who bore singletons. They find large short-term effects of unplanned births on labor-force participation, poverty, and...

Studies based on inputs measured at the state level generally report that school expenditures have substantial effects on students' adult wages, whereas studies based on less aggregated measures report small effects. The author uses wage data from High School and Beyond to analyze this...

We study the relationship between welfare benefits and the time to first marriage and time to next birth among initially unwed mothers. We use twin births to generate random within-state variation in benefits, effectively controlling for unobservables that may confound the relationship between...

Despite widespread popular accounts that link crack cocaine to inner-city decay, little systematic research has analyzed how the emergence of crack affected urban crime. We study this question using FBI crime rates for 27 metropolitan areas and two sources of information on when crack first...