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Journal Article
The growing difference in college attainment between women and men
Workers with more education typically earn more than those with less education, and the difference has been growing in recent decades. Not surprisingly, the percentage of the population going after and getting a college degree has been rising as well. Since the late 1970s, though, the increase in college attainment has stalled for men and gathered steam for women. Among college-age individuals, more women now graduate than men. Changes in labor market incentives appear to explain the increased investment in education made by women. But men?s investments in education have been much less ...
Journal Article
The Consequences of Exposure to Violence during Early Childhood
We investigate the impact that exposure to violence in childhood has on an individual?s propensity to engage in risky behaviors later in life and their probability of dying young. We document that black young males in the United States are exposed to much more violence in early childhood than their white counterparts. We also show that exposure to violence has a strong relationship with a host of undesirable later outcomes, and that relationship tends to be the same regardless of race, household income, mother?s educational attainment, or family structure.
Working Paper
Covariates and causal effects: the problem of context
This paper is concerned with understanding how causal effects can be identified in past data and then used to predict the future in light of the problem of context, or the fact that treatment always influences the outcome variable in combination with covariates. Structuralist and experimentalist views of econometric methodology can be reconciled by adopting notation capable of distinguishing between effects independent of and dependent on context, or direct and net effects. By showing that identification of direct and net effects imposes distinct assumptions on selection into covariates ...
Working Paper
Neighborhood dynamics and the distribution of opportunity
This paper uses an overlapping-generations dynamic general equilibrium model of residential sorting and intergenerational human capital accumulation to investigate effects of neighborhood externalities. In the model, households choose where to live and how much to invest toward the production of their child?s human capital. The return on the parent?s investment is determined in part by the child?s ability and in part by an externality from the average human capital in their neighborhood. We use the model to test a prominent hypothesis about the concentration of poverty within ...
Working Paper
Opioids and the Labor Market
This paper finds evidence that opioid availability decreases labor force participation while a large labor market shock does not influence the share of opioid abusers. We first identify the effect of availability on participation using the geographic variation in opioid prescription rates. We use a combination of the American Community Survey (ACS) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) county-level prescription data to examine labor market patterns across both rural and metropolitan areas of the United States from 2007 to 2016. Individuals in areas with higher prescription ...
Journal Article
The Racial Wealth Gap and Access to Opportunity Neighborhoods
Some Black households live in neighborhoods with lower incomes, as well as higher unemployment rates and lower educational attainment, than their own incomes might suggest, and this may impede their economic mobility. We investigate reasons for the neighborhood sorting patterns we observe and find that differences in financial factors such as income, wealth, or housing costs between Black and white households do not explain racial distributions across neighborhoods. Our findings suggest other factors are at work, including discrimination in the housing market, ongoing racial hostility, or ...
Working Paper
Human capital in the inner city
Black males in the United States are exposed to tremendous violence at young ages: In the NLSY97 26 percent report seeing someone shot by age 12, and 43 percent by age 18. This paper studies how this exposure to violence and its associated social isolation affect education and labor market outcomes. I use Elijah Anderson?s ethnographic research on the ?code of the street? to guide the specification of a model of human capital accumulation that includes street capital, the skills and knowledge useful for providing personal security in neighborhoods where it is not provided by state ...
Working Paper
Assessing the evidence on neighborhood effects from moving to opportunity
The interpretation of estimates from Moving to Opportunity (MTO) as neighborhood effects has created significant controversy among social scientists. This paper presents a framework that clarifies the interpretation of results from the MTO housing mobility experiment. The paper defines several neighborhood treatments and estimates their Local Average Treatment Effects (LATEs) using assigned treatment in MTO as an instrumental variable. This framework clarifies that while parameters estimated in the literature do not suffer from selection bias, selection into treatment is an inescapable issue ...
Working Paper
What Is the Equity-Efficiency Tradeoff when Maintaining Wells in Rural Haiti?
This paper quantitatively compares water infrastructure interventions that prioritize equity with those that prioritize efficiency. The community-based model developed by Haiti Outreach (HO) trains communities to operate and maintain wells, and has clear effi ciency gains over the status quo aid model in Haiti that gives communities wells: HO?s wells were 8.7 percentage points more likely to be functioning after one year than similarly-constructed wells managed under the status quo model. Because HO?s model includes user fees, which raise concerns about equity, I quantify the ...
Working Paper
Redshirting, compulsory schooling laws, and educational attainment
A wide literature uses date of birth as an instrument to study the causal effects of educational attainment. This paper shows how parents delaying their children?s initial enrollment in kindergarten, a practice known as redshirting, can make estimates obtained through this identification framework all but impossible to interpret. A latent index model is used to illustrate how the monotonicity assumption in this framework is violated if redshirting decisions are made in a setting of essential heterogeneity. Empirical evidence is presented from the ECLS-K data set that favors this scenario; ...