There has been a rising interest in understanding better the impact of college choices on wages, an interest motivated by concerns about increasing wage inequalities, about increasing costs of elite colleges, and about the perceived increasing roles of highly educated individuals in maintaining...

This paper investigates previously unresearched issues pertaining to the well-known Chilean innovations in Social Security. Previous empirical studies of the Chilean system used aggregate and macro data, without attention to individual heterogeneity. This study uses new household survey data,...

This paper outlines the economic rationale for investments that reduce stunting. We present a framework that illustrates the functional consequences of stunting in the 1000 days after conception throughout the life cycle: from childhood through to old age. We summarize the key empirical...

The assessment of the impact of social programs is the subject of lively, sometimes heated debate over whether program evaluation is best conducted either by comparing mean outcomes from a randomized intervention or by using econometric techniques with nonrandom samples. This paper contributes...

This study presents new estimates of the impact of social networks on attitudes and behavior in two areas, family planning and AIDS. The study explicitly allows for the possibility that social networks are not chosen randomly, but rather that important characteristics such as unobserved...

Two major health-related policy objectives are to increase the birthweights of children in low-birthweight populations and to reduce weight or body mass among most adults. There have been a number of previous studies on these topics. However, the literatures concerned with the consequences of...

This paper applies a new approach to the estimation of the impact of policy, both the levels and the changes, on wage differentials using a new high-quality data set on wage differentials by schooling level for 18 Latin American countries for the period 1977-1998. The results indicate that...

A new anti-poverty program in Mexico, PROGRESA, provides monetary transfers to families that are contingent upon their children's regular attendance at school. The benefit levels are intended to offset the opportunity costs of not sending children to school and vary with the grade level and...

We estimate associations between a polygenic score (PGS) for depressive symptoms, schooling attainment and genetic-environmental (GxE) associations with depressive symptoms and depression for 29 years old in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) and 53 years old in...

Interest in estimating the impact of school quality on earnings has increased. But most studies on this topic have important limitations, particularly in studies for developing countries. They tend to ignore behavioral decisions regarding schooling and individual and family background...