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.

The employment and earnings effects of the minimum wage are estimated by parameterizing a hypothesized relationship between underlying market employment and wage relationships versus observed wage and employment distributions in the presence of a legislated minimum. If there had been no minimum during the 1973-78 period, we estimate that employment among out-of-school men 16-24 would have been approximately 4% higher than it was. Among young men 16-19 employment would have been about 7% higher; among those 20-24, 2% higher. Employment among black youth 16-24 would have been almost 6% higher than it was, compared with somewhat less than 4% for white youth. Although it is sometimes argued that the adverse employment effects of the minimum are offset by increased earnings, we find virtually no earnings effect. Had the minimum not been raised over the 1973-78 period, inflation would have greatly moderated the adverse employment effects of the minimum, with approximately two-thirds of the potential employment gains from elimination of the minimum attained. The weight of our evidence is inconsistent with a general increase in youth wage rates with increases in the real minimum. Our findings support the hypothesis that the effects of the minimum are concentrated on youth with subminimum market wage rates.

There is much variation in the union/nonunion wage gap across groups of workers within each of the two sectors, public and private. Furthermore, the variation in the public sector does not parallel in all of its detail that in the private sector. Thus, though the public-sector gaps typically are somewhat below their private-sector counterparts, there are important exceptions to this difference, especially among employees of local governments: public school teachers, clerical workers, refuse collectors, local transit bus drivers, licensed practical nurses, hospital technicians, nonprofessional hospital workers, and undoubtedly some others.

Although recent research suggests that intergenerational transfers play an important role in aggregate capital accumulation, our understanding of bequest motives remains incomplete. We develop a simple model of strategic bequests in which a testator influences the decisions of his beneficiaries by holding wealth in bequeathable forms and by conditioning the division of bequests on the beneficiaries' actions. The model generates falsifiable empirical predictions that are inconsistent with other theories of intergenerational transfers. We present econometric and other evidence that strongly suggests that bequests are often used as compensation for services rendered by beneficiaries.

The simplest economic theories of crime predict that profit-maximizing firms should follow strategies of minimal monitoring with large penalties for employee crime. We investigate possible reasons why firms actually spend considerable resources trying to detect employee malfeasance. We find that the most plausible explanations for firms' large outlays on monitoring of employees-legal restrictions on penalty clauses in contracts and the adverse impact of harsh punishment schemes on worker morale-are also consistent with the payment of premium (rent-generating) wages by cost-minimizing firms.

We use the medical specialties of physician-patients with advanced cancer to study the role of knowledge versus networks in treatment choices and patient survival by matching comparable patients with doctors and admission periods to control unobserved doctor quality. Physician-patients are less likely to have surgery, radiation, or checkups and more likely to receive targeted therapy, spend more on drugs, enjoy a higher survival rate, and spend less on coinsurance than nonphysician-patients. Knowledge mechanisms play a crucial role because the network effect explains some, but not all, patterns. For less informed physician-patients, possessing a network is equivalent to reducing medical knowledge.

Even before the Great Recession, US employment growth was unimpressive. Between 2000 and 2007, the economy gave back the considerable employment gains achieved during the 1990s, with a historic contraction in manufacturing employment being a prime contributor to the slump. We estimate that import competition from China, which surged after 2000, was a major force behind both recent reductions in US manufacturing employment and—through input-output linkages and other general equilibrium channels—weak overall US job growth. Our central estimates suggest job losses from rising Chinese import competition over 1999–2011 in the range of 2.0–2.4 million.