Knowledge that Transforms

This paper examines the effects of an intervention that expanded access to low-cost, government-sponsored, community-based playgroups in rural Indonesia. Instrumental variables and difference-in-differences models indicate that while the intervention raised enrollment rates and durations of enrollment for everyone, on average, there was little impact on child development. The two models correspond to different durations of project exposure. The difference-in-differences model captures greater exposure and shows that there are modest and sustained impacts on child development—especially for children from more disadvantaged backgrounds. There is also evidence that the intervention encouraged substitution away from other services, such as kindergartens.

Recently Gregory Clark and coauthors have argued that social mobility rates are constant across countries and lower than traditionally estimated, hypothesizing that prior estimates of intergenerational persistence are attenuated from focusing on a single proxy for underlying status. We test this proposition by incorporating multiple proxy measures into a “least-attenuated” estimate of persistence for Sweden and conducting a Sweden–United States comparison. We find no evidence of substantial bias in prior estimates or of similarity across countries. We further extend our analysis to mothers, finding that additional measures improve the ability to capture transmission from mothers to both sons and daughters.

This paper studies customer discrimination against Arab workers in the Israeli market for labor-intensive services. Relying on surveys, field data, and a natural experiment, we provide evidence consistent with Becker’s customer discrimination model. First, a significant share of Jewish customers prefer to receive labor-intensive services from firms employing Jewish rather than Arab workers; these preferences are most strongly linked to concerns for personal safety. Second, customer preferences affect firms’ hiring decisions. Third, firms employing Arab workers charge significantly lower service prices than those employing only Jewish workers.

We investigate how workers’ performance is affected by the timing of wages in a real-effort experiment. In all treatments, agents earn the same wage sum, but wage increases are distributed differently over time. We find that agents work harder under increasing wage profiles if they do not know these profiles in advance. A profile that continuously increases wages by small amounts raises performance by about 15% relative to a constant wage. The effort reactions can be organized by a model in which agents reciprocally respond to wage impulses, comparing wages to an adaptive reference standard determined by the previous wage.

I use Swedish registry data to estimate lifetime earnings returns to college and how they vary with observed and unobserved characteristics. The richness of the data also allows me to examine heterogeneity with respect to cognitive and noncognitive ability and parental earnings. Local instrumental variable analysis is used to recover marginal and average treatment effects under selection on gains. The findings support the notion of self-selection, but mainly on observed characteristics. Returns vary little with parental earnings but substantially with respect to both cognitive and noncognitive ability, thus suggesting important complementarities between formal schooling and informal skills.

While a large literature has focused on the impact of parental investments on child cognitive development, very little is known about the role of the child’s own investments alongside that of the parents. By using the Child Development Supplement of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we model the cognitive production function for adolescents using an augmented value-added model and adopt an estimation method that takes account of unobserved child characteristics. We find that a child’s own investments made during adolescence matter more than the mother’s. Our empirical results appear to be robust to several sensitivity checks.

We investigate the external validity of local average treatment effects (LATEs), specifically Angrist and Evans’s use of same sex of the two first children as an instrumental variable for the effect of fertility on labor supply. We estimate their specification in 139 country-year censuses using Integrated Public Use Microdata Sample–International data. We compare each country-year’s actual LATE to the extrapolated LATE from other country-years. We find that, with a sufficiently large reference sample, we extrapolate the treatment effect reasonably well, but the degree of accuracy depends on the extent of covariate similarity between the target and reference settings.

We implement a regression discontinuity design using the continuous raw Advanced Placement (AP) exam scores, which are mapped into the observed 1–5 integer scores, for over 4.5 million students. Earning higher AP integer scores positively affects college completion and subsequent exam-taking. Specifically, attaining credit-granting integer scores increases the probability that a student will receive a bachelor’s degree within 4 years by 1–2 percentage points per exam. We also find that receiving a score of 3 over a 2 on junior year AP exams causes students to take between 0.06 and 0.14 more AP exams senior year.

We provide evidence on the distributional effects of Quebec’s universal child care policy. Our analysis uncovers substantial policy relevant heterogeneity in the estimated effect of access to subsidized child care across two developmental score distributions for children from two-parent families. Whereas past research reported findings of negative effects on mothers and children from these families, igniting controversy, our estimates reveal a more nuanced image that formal child care can indeed boost developmental outcomes for children from some households: particularly disadvantaged single-parent households. We present suggestive evidence that the heterogeneity in policy effects is consistent with differences in home learning environments.

We investigate the relationship between housing wealth, property taxes, and elderly labor supply using longitudinal data from the Health and Retirement Survey spanning the recent boom/bust housing cycle. When combined with MSA-specific house price indexes, the data provide plausibly exogenous variation in housing wealth, identified through within-MSA renter/homeowner comparisons. Our findings suggest that elderly households respond to variation in housing wealth and property taxes in the predicted opposing directions, that wealth influences labor supply to a lesser extent than factors like health and marital status, and that the effect of housing wealth on labor supply varies by gender and age.