Nonlinearities in growth have important implications for cross-country income inequality. In particular, they imply that countries may spend long periods of time in a low-growth poverty trap. However, finding evidence of such nonlinearities in the data and accounting for their emergence pose...

The Federal Stafford loan program is the largest source of financial aid to students who attend college in the United States. Here we utilize the increase in Stafford loan limits that occurred between 2006 and 2008 to identify how a pooled cross-section of first-time freshmen at the University...

We investigate the effects of political institutions on economic growth. We specifically explore this relationship while controlling for heterogeneity and model uncertainty. We use threshold regression (Hansen (2000)) to search for possible nonlinearities and/or interaction effects with respect...

Using the first release of the three-wave, four-year General Social Survey panel dataset, we track changes in attitudes towards redistribution and government from 2006 to 2010 to find that decreases in demand for redistribution are associated with decreases in confidence in government after the...

Recent empirical work on the 2008-09 financial crisis has found mixed results on the usefulness of indicators to explain the cross-country variation in the incidence of the crisis in non-originating countries. While some authors have found success with various indicators, Rose and Spiegel...

The importance of (early) parental investments in children's cognitive and noncognitive outcomes is a question of deep policy significance. However, because parental investments are arguably endogenous, it is a great challenge to empirically estimate their importance. This paper exploits a rich...