Accurate estimates of the extent of ethnic parity amongst benefit claimants are very important for policymakers who provide interventions for these groups. We use new administrative data on benefit claimants in Great Britain to document differences in labour market outcomes between Ethnic Minority and White claimants, both before and after controlling for rich observable characteristics. We do ...

Twenty-seven years after switching to a fully-funded privately-managed pension system, Chilean lawmakers are concerned that only 58% of the labor force made contributions in 2000. I develop a dynamic model of the joint husband and wife labor and saving decisions to study whether mandatory contributions affects incentives to choose self-insurance over social insurance. Households face a dual lab...

Policymakers have long been concerned about the large social costs of juvenile crime. Detecting the causes of juvenile crime is an important educational policy concern as many of these crimes happen during the school day. In the 2009-10 school year, the State of Hawaii responded to fiscal strains by furloughing all school teachers employed by the Department of Education and cancelling classes f...

Access to abortion and publicly funded family planning services in the U.S. has declined considerably over the past five years. We separately identify the impacts of restricted access to abortion clinics and non-abortion family planning clinics on reproductive behavior using data on abortions, births, and contraceptive purchases. Variation in clinic access comes from three pieces of legislation...

The Rising Cost of Child Care in the United States: A Reassessment of the Evidence Anecdotal evidence suggests that the cost of child care in the U.S. has increased substantially over the past few decades. This paper marshals data from a variety of sources to rigorously assess the issue. It begins by using nationally representative survey data to trace the evolution in families’ child care expe...

How does the minimum wage affect crime rates? Empirical research suggests that increasing a worker’s wage can deter him from committing crimes. On the other hand, if that worker becomes displaced as a result of the minimum wage, he may be more likely to commit a crime. In this paper, I describe a frictional world in which a worker’s criminal actions are linked to his labor market outcomes. The ...