We examine US children whose parents won the lottery to trace out the effect of financial resources on college attendance. The analysis leverages federal tax and financial aid records and substantial variation in win size and timing. While per-dollar effects are modest, the relationship is weakly concave, with a high upper bound for amounts greatly exceeding college costs. Effects are smaller among low-SES households, not sensitive to how early in adolescence the shock occurs, and not moderated by financial aid crowd-out. The results imply that households derive consumption value from college, and household financial constraints alone do not inhibit attendance. (JEL G51, I22, I23, I24, I26, I28, J24, J31)

Since the beginning of the all-volunteer era, millions of young Americans have chosen to enlist in the military. These volunteers disproportionately come from disadvantaged backgrounds, and while some aspects of military service are likely to be beneficial, exposure to violence and other elements of service could worsen outcomes. This article links the universe of army applicants between 1990 and 2011 to their federal tax records and other administrative data and uses two eligibility thresholds in the Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT) in a regression discontinuity design to estimate the effects of army enlistment on earnings and related outcomes. In the 19 years following application, army service increases average annual earnings by over $4,000 at both cutoffs. However, whether service increases long-run earnings varies significantly by race. Black servicemembers experience annual gains of $5,500 to $15,000 11–19 years after applying while white servicemembers do not experience significant changes. By providing Black servicemembers a stable and well-paying army job and by opening doors to higher-paid postservice employment, the army significantly closes the Black-white earnings gap in our sample.

Programs to encourage labor market activity among youth, including public employment programs and wage subsidies like the Work Opportunity Tax Credit, can be supported by three broad rationales. They may (i) provide contemporaneous income support to participants; (ii) encourage work experience that improves future employment and/or educational outcomes of participants; and/or (iii) keep participants “out of trouble.” We study randomized lotteries for access to the New York City (NYC) Summer Youth Employment Program (SYEP), the largest summer youth employment program in the United States, by merging SYEP administrative data on 294,100 lottery participants to IRS data on the universe of U.S. tax records; to New York State administrative incarceration data; and to NYC administrative cause of death data. In assessing the three rationales, we find that (i) SYEP participation causes average earnings and the probability of employment to increase in the year of program participation, with modest contemporaneous crowdout of other earnings and employment; (ii) SYEP participation causes a modest decrease in average earnings for three years following the program and has no impact on college enrollment; and (iii) SYEP participation decreases the probability of incarceration and decreases the probability of mortality, which has important and potentially pivotal implications for analyzing the net benefits of the program.

We compare winning and losing firms in lotteries for H-1B visas, matching administrative data on these lotteries to administrative tax data on US firms and to approved US patents. Winning one additional H-1B visa crowds out about 1.5 other workers at the firm. Additional H-1Bs have insignificant and at most modest effects on firm innovation. More general evidence from the universe of US firms and the universe of H-1B visas using alternative estimation strategies is consistent with these results. Firms that hire H-1Bs grow faster and innovate more because they are different in other ways from firms that do not.