Head Start and the Distribution of Long Term Education and Labor Market Outcomes* In this paper we investigate the effect of Head Start on long term education and labor market outcomes using data from the NLSY79. The contributions to the existing literature on the effectiveness of Head Start are threefold: (1) we are the first to examine distributional effects of Head Start on long term outcome...

The Roma constitute the largest, poorest and youngest ethnic minority group in Europe. Over the last few years, they have attracted unprecedented attention with the fear of massive waves of emigrants to Western European countries. Using unique comparative data from 12 Central and South-East European countries, we study the pattern and determinants of Roma emigration intentions. We find that pla...

There is substantial interest in development policies related to international migration from developing countries. In the last decade, there has been a wave of rigorous empirical studies (many of which are randomized controlled trials) quantifying the impacts of such policies. This article examines evidence on the impacts of policies in five areas: 1) migration facilitation, 2) migrant educati...

On the Power of Childhood Impressions for Skill Formation: Initial Evidence and Unsettled Questions Manifold childhood impressions result from the interactions with adult caregivers and the environment. These impressions, be they beneficial or detrimental, shape individual skill formation and achievement over the life cycle. The novelty of the paper is that it bonds two different, hitherto sepa...

The Impact of Parents Migration on the Well-being of Children Left Behind: Initial Evidence from Romania Many children grow up with parents working abroad. Economists are interested in the achievement and well-being of these “home alone” children to better understand the positive and negative aspects of migration in the sending countries. This paper examines the causal effects of parents’ migra...

What accounts for economic growth and prosperity? What stands at their origin? Recent literature typically searches for single univariate causal explanations: institutions, culture, human capital, geography. In this paper we provide instead a first theoretical modeling of the interaction between different possible explanations for growth and prosperity (in particular, between culture and instit...

The ART of Life: IVF or Child Adoption? This paper analyzes the effects of child adoption on the utilization of assisted reproductive technology (ART) in the US. Using state-level longitudinal data for 1999-2006, we show that ART use is responsive to changes in adoption markets. Controlling for state-specific fixed effects, the estimated elasticity of ART cycles performed with respect to child ...

We provide a new explanation for the narrowing and reversal of the gender education gap. We assume that parents maximize the full income of their children and that males have an additional income, independently of education. This additional income biases preferences towards sons and implies that females have relative advantage in producing income through education. When the returns to human cap...

We study the effect of fertility on labor supply in Argentina and Mexico exploiting a source of exogenous variability in family size first introduced by Angrist and Evans (1998) for the United States. Our results constitute the first external validation of the estimates obtained for the US. External validation of empirical results is central to the making of rigorous science, but there are very...

The study examines the role of the largest public works program in the world-the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) in buffering the negative effects of early childhood exposure to rainfall shocks on long-term health outcomes. Exploiting the spatial and temporal variation in NREGS coverage, the study estimates the extent to which nutritional insults in early childhood can be off...