This paper studies the long-term effects of participation in the Mexican Oportunidades program on a variety of outcomes and behaviors of rural youth in Mexico. It analyzes data from a social experiment, which randomly phased-in the program in rural Mexican villages. In 1997, 320 villages (the...

The Mincer earnings function is the cornerstone of a large literature in empirical economics. This paper discusses the theoretical foundations of the Mincer model and examines the empirical support for it using data from Decennial Censuses and Current Population surveys. While data from the 1940...

The internal rate of return to schooling is a fundamental economic parameter that is often used to assess whether expenditure on education should be increased or decreased. This paper considers alternative approaches to estimating marginal internal rates of return for different schooling levels....

The probability of selection into treatment plays an important role in matching and selection models. However, this probability can often not be consistently estimated, because of choice-based sampling designs with unknown sampling weights. This note establishes that the selection and matching...

Numerous studies regress log earnings on schooling and report estimated coefficients as Mincer rates of return. A more recent literature uses instrumental variables. This chapter considers the economic interpretation of these analyses and how the availability of repeated cross section and panel...

Previous empirical research has shown that Mexico's Oportunidades program has succeeded in increasing schooling and improving health of disadvantaged children. This paper studies the program's potential longer-term consequences for the poverty and inequality of these children. It adapts methods...

The high correlation of industrial pollutant emissions complicates the estimation of the impact of industrial pollutants on health. To circumvent this, we use emissions from Kīlauea volcano, uncorrelated with other pollution sources, to estimate the impact of pollutants on local emergency room...

This study pairs variation stemming from volcanic eruptions from Kilauea with the census of Hawai'i's public schools student test scores to estimate the impact of particulates and sulfur dioxide on student performance. We leverage spatial correlations in pollution in conjunction with proximity...