Programs that increase the economic capacity of poor women can have cascading effects on children's participation in school and work that are theoretically undetermined. We present a simple model to describe the possible channels through which these programs may affect children's activities....

Inequality in access to education is known to be a key driver of income inequality in developing countries. Viet Nam, a transitional economy, exhibits significant segmentation in the market for skilled labor based on more remunerative employment in government and state firms. We ask whether this...

The Bracero Program was a massive guest worker program that allowed over four million Mexican workers to migrate legally and work temporarily in the United States from 1942 to 1964. This paper examines the development impacts of the program. Exploiting a natural experiment in the institutional...

This paper examines the effects of a massive salt iodization program on human capital formation of school-aged children in China. Exploiting province and time variation, we find a strong positive impact on cognition for girls and no effects for boys. For non-cognitive skills, we find the...

We examine the channels through which a randomized early childhood intervention in Colombia led to significant gains in cognitive and socio-emotional skills among a sample of disadvantaged children. We estimate production functions for cognitive and socio-emotional skills as a function of...

This paper examines the impact of a large scale school construction program in India, the District Primary Education Programme (DPEP), on educational outcomes of direct beneficiaries and their children. Between the years 1993-2004, DPEP served over 50 million children and prioritized districts...

We estimate production functions for cognition and health for children aged 1-12 in India, where over 70 million children aged 0-5 are at risk of developmental deficits. The inputs into the production functions include parental background, prior child cognition and health, and child investments....

We extend the Lucas' 1988 model introducing two classes of agents with heterogeneous skills, discount factors and initial human capital endowments. We consider two regimes according to the planner's political constraints. In the first regime, that we call meritocracy, the planner faces...

Immigration in the United States is characterized by a number of empirical regularities. Immigrants cluster geographically and are often employed together. Immigrant earnings differ by origin, even after controlling for education and experience. A large fraction of immigrants eventually returns...

This research was motivated by the increasing number of foreign students and scientists who are in the United States on temporary visas who are able to change their status to permanent immigrant. Origin countries, among them industrialized western European nations, are concerned about losing...