Knowledge that Transforms

Workfare can impact child development by inducing parents to spend less time at home. I study the mechanisms by which workfare policies affect children using the New Hope workfare experiment. The program randomly assigned individuals to a policy bundle including income and childcare subsidies conditional on full-time work. For families with young children, the program had positive effects on child academic performance and classroom behavior. Counterfactual experiments from a dynamic discrete choice model indicate that most of the effect of New Hope on young children is explained by parents enrolling their children in center-based childcare.

In the United States, age at first marriage was lowest and the education gap between husbands and wives was highest during the 1950s. The conventional explanation for such a negative correlation is that early marriage leads to earlier and higher fertility, which in turn prevents women from acquiring education. Here, we propose that early marriages enabled couples to overcome credit constraints in education. A model that includes this motive and mechanism can replicate not only the marriage and education patterns observed in the middle of the century in the United States but also the overall trends over the twentieth century.

This study investigates the effects of unobserved earnings-related endowments on marital outcomes, focusing on potential gender differences. Using a less stringent, more plausible assumption that monozygotic twins share more similar endowments relative to dizygotic twins, we develop a novel identification strategy from the twins experiment. Using unique Chinese twins survey data, we find that men with genetic endowments related to higher earnings marry earlier and have younger, taller wives; such women marry later and have older husbands with higher education and income. Results cast doubt on the conventional assumption of independence between unobservables and observable marital attributes.

Rising between-firm pay dispersion accounts for the majority of the dramatic increase in earnings inequality in the United States in the last several decades. This paper shows that a distinct cross-cohort pattern drives this rise: newer cohorts of firms enter more dispersed and stay more dispersed throughout their lives. These cohort patterns suggest a link between changes in firm entry associated with the decline in business dynamism and the rise in earnings inequality. Cohort effects also imply a slow diffusion of inequality: inequality rises as younger and more unequal cohorts of firms replace older and more equal cohorts.

We model optimal treatment assignment in programs with a limited number of seats and study how the presence of peer effects impacts the optimal allocation rule. We then use data from a randomized control trial to show evidence that there are large peer effects in the context of job training for disadvantaged adults in the United States. Finally, we combine the model and the empirics to show that the program would have had a much greater impact if the assignment choices had accounted for the peer effects.

There are two essential mechanisms in the canonical model of the transmission of income across generations—parents’ financial resources and parental education. I provide novel empirical evidence to disentangle the significance of these two mechanisms in explaining the intergenerational transmission of income. Utilizing two reforms and administrative data from Sweden, I find that parents’ financial resources amount to about 25% of the effect of parental education on children’s income. Additionally, I show that parents’ financial resources matter less for sons. Overall, my findings suggest a comparatively modest impact of parental financial resources on children’s income.

Using establishment-level panel data from the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program, I estimate the effect of minimum wage increases implemented by 10 states in 2014 and 2015. I show that minimum wage increases lead to wage spillovers within establishments. I find little evidence that minimum wage increases induce establishments to reorganize their occupational mix. Finally, I find that minimum wage increases propagate up the management hierarchy, leading to increased wages for supervisors. Nonetheless, I find that overall wage inequality decreases within establishments after minimum wage increases.

This paper measures the degree of monopsony power in the US higher-education labor market by using school-specific labor demand instruments to directly estimate the residual labor supply curves facing individual universities. The results indicate that schools have significant monopsony power over tenure-track faculty but face perfectly elastic residual labor supply curves for non-tenure-track faculty. There is some evidence for three sources of monopsony power often discussed in the literature—employer concentration, search frictions/job-switching costs, and differentiated jobs. The results also suggest that monopsony over tenure-track faculty may have contributed to the trend toward hiring more non-tenure-track faculty.

Social and emotional learning (SEL) programs that target disruptive students aim to improve their classroom behavior. Small-scale programs in high-income countries have demonstrated positive effects. Using a randomized experiment, we show that a nationwide SEL program in Chile has no effect. Very disruptive students seem to reduce the program’s effectiveness. With attention deficit hyperactivity disorder being more prevalent in middle- than high-income countries, very disruptive students may be more present there, which could diminish the effectiveness of SEL programs. Moreover, implementation fidelity seems lower in this program than in the small-scale ones considered earlier, which could also explain the program’s null effect.