Many early intervention studies experience a dissolution of treatment effects in the aftermath of the intervention. Using a randomized trial, this paper examines the impact of Preparing for Life, a pregnancy to age five home visiting and parenting program, on outcomes in middle childhood. I find significant treatment effects on cognitive skills (0.55SD) and school achievement tests (0.30-0.54SD) at age nine. There is no impact on socio-emotional skills and there is little evidence of treatment heterogeneity by gender, birth order, or distribution of ability. The effects are mainly driven by improvements in early parental beliefs.

Police discretion has large potential consequences for public trust and safety; however, little is known about the extent of this discretion. I show that arrests critically depend on which officer responds to a 911 call; 1 standard deviation increase in officer arrest propensity raises arrest likelihood by 40%. High arrest officers are more likely to be white and have less experience. I find mixed evidence that arrest propensity is related to arrest quality. High arrest officers use force more often and make more low-level arrests, while they also have a higher share of low-level arrests that result in conviction.

We investigate the impacts of a perinatal psychosocial intervention on trajectories of maternal mental health and child skills, from birth to age 3. We find improved maternal mental health and functioning (0.17 to 0.29 SD), modest but imprecisely estimated improvements in parenting (0.07 to 0.11 SD), and transitory improvements in child socioemotional development (0.06 to 0.39 SD). The intervention had negligible influence on physical health and cognition. Estimates of a skill production function reveal the intervention attenuated the negative association between maternal depression and child outcomes, and narrowed outcome gaps between mothers who were and were not depressed in pregnancy.

This paper studies distributional effects of education on health. In 1972, England, Scotland, and Wales raised their minimum school-leaving age from 15 to 16 for students born after 9/1/1957. Using a regression discontinuity design and objective health measures for 129,000 individuals, we find that education reduced body size and increased blood pressure in middle age. The reduction in body size was concentrated at the upper tail of the distribution with an 8 percentage point reduction in obesity. The increase in blood pressure was concentrated at the lower tail of the distribution with no effect on stage 2 hypertension.

Studying 5.6 million biomedical science articles published over three decades, we reconcile conflicts in a longstanding interdisciplinary literature on scientists' life-cycle productivity by controlling for selective attrition and distinguishing between research quantity and quality. While research quality declines monotonically over the career, this decline is easily overlooked because higher "ability" authors have longer publishing careers. Our results have implications for broader questions of human capital accumulation over the career and federal research policies that shift funding to early-career researchers - while funding researchers at their most creative, these policies must be undertaken carefully because young researchers are less "able" on average.

This paper argues that distributions of spousal earnings gaps provide no identifying information for the male breadwinner norm, nor such a norm's consequences for gender inequality. First, we show that simple marital matching models-without norm-related assumptions-closely replicate U.S. distributions of wife-husband earnings gaps. Second, we show that the discontinuity in this distribution as wives start to out-earn husbands reflects not breadwinner norms, but rather a point mass of equal-earning couples. We conclude by arguing that the point mass may also threaten other tests of the male breadwinner hypothesis, and proposing several robustness checks that future research should utilize.

We evaluate the impact of paid sick leave (PSL) mandates on PSL coverage, work absences, and presenteeism (i.e. attending work while sick) for private sector workers in the U.S. Our identification strategy relies on geographic and temporal variation in mandate enactment, as well as within-county variation in the propensity to gain PSL following a mandate. We find that PSL mandates increase coverage rates and work absences for those most likely to gain coverage, and that these effects are larger for women and households with children. We also provide evidence that PSL mandates reduce the rate of presenteeism.

Even need-based financial aid programs typically require recipients to meet Satisfactory Academic Progress (SAP) requirements. Using regression discontinuity and difference-in-difference designs, we examine the consequences of failing SAP for community college entrants in one state. We find heterogeneous academic effects in the short term, but, after six years, negative effects on academic and labor market outcomes dominate. Declines in credits attempted are two to three times as large as declines in credits earned, suggesting that SAP may increase aid efficiency. But students themselves are worse off, and the policy exacerbates inequality by pushing out low-income students faster than their higher-income peers.

How much of the income-based gaps in cognitive ability and academic achievement could be closed by a two-year, center-based early childhood education intervention? Data from the Infant Health and Development Program (IHDP), which randomly assigned treatment to low-birth-weight children from both higher- and low-income families between ages one and three, shows much larger impacts among low-than higher-income children. Projecting IHDP impacts to the U.S. population's IQ and achievement trajectories suggests that such a program offered to low-income children would essentially eliminate the income-based gap at age three and between a third and three-quarters of the age five and age eight gaps.

We estimate the trend in the transitory variance of male earnings in the U.S. using the Michigan Panel Study of Income Dynamics from 1970 to 2004. Using an error components model and simpler but only approximate methods, we find that the transitory variance started to increase in the early 1970s, continued to increase through the mid-1980s, and then remained at this new higher level through the 1990s and beyond. Thus the increase mostly occurred about thirty years ago. Its increase accounts for between 31 and 49 percent of the total rise in cross-sectional variance, depending on the time period.

We treat health as a form of human capital and hypothesize that women with more human capital face stronger incentives to make costly investments with future payoffs, such as avoiding abusive partners and reducing drug use. To test this hypothesis, we exploit the unanticipated introduction of an HIV treatment, HAART, which dramatically improved HIV+ women's health. We find that after the introduction of HAART HIV+ women who experienced increases in expected longevity exhibited a decrease in domestic violence of 15% and in drug use of 1520%. We rule out confounding via secular trends using a control group of healthier women.

The role of psychological attributes such as hope in escaping poverty has attracted increasing attention. Crucial questions include the impact of early development of positive psychological attributes on socioeconomic outcomes, and whether interventions to reduce poverty increase such attributes. We examine the impact of international child sponsorship on the psychology of Indonesian children by employing a novel program evaluation technique-a quantified analysis of children's self-portraits. To identify causal effects, we exploit an eligibility rule that established a maximum age for participation. We find that international sponsorship significantly raises sponsored children's levels of happiness (0.42), self-efficacy (0.29), and hope (0.66).

Using annual cross-sectional data on over 100,000 adolescents aged 12-17, we studied academic and behavioral outcomes among those who were and were not likely affected by FDA warnings regarding the safety of antidepressants. Compared to other adolescents, adolescents with probable depression experienced a relative decline in grade point average of .14 points following the FDA warnings. The FDA warnings also coincided with increased delinquency, use of tobacco and use of illicit drugs. Together, our results stress the importance of mental health and its treatment as an input into cognitive and non-cognitive aspects of human capital.

We use matching combined with difference-in-differences to identify the causal effects of sudden illness, represented by acute hospitalizations, on employment and income up to six years after the health shock using linked Dutch hospital and tax register data. An acute hospital admission lowers the employment probability by seven percentage points and results in a five percent loss of personal income two years after the shock. There is no subsequent recovery in either employment or income. There are large spillover effects: household income falls by 50 percent more than the income of the disabled person.

Research from the United States shows that gaps in early cognitive and non-cognitive ability appear early in the life cycle. Little is known about this important question for developing countries. This paper provides new evidence of sharp differences in cognitive development by socioeconomic status in early childhood for five Latin American countries. To help with comparability, we use the same measure of receptive language ability for all five countries. We find important differences in development in early childhood across countries, and steep socioeconomic gradients within every country. For the three countries where we can follow children over time, there are few substantive changes in scores once children enter school. Our results are robust to different ways of defining socioeconomic status, to different ways of standardizing outcomes, and to selective non-response on our measure of cognitive development.

This paper demonstrates that immigration decisions depend on local labor market conditions by documenting the change in low-skilled immigrant inflows in response to supply increases among the US-born. Using pre-reform welfare participation rates as an instrument for changes in native labor supply, I find that immigrants competing with native entrants systematically prefer cities with smaller supply shocks. The extent of the response is substantial: for each native woman working due to reform, 0.5 fewer female immigrants enter the local labor force. These results provide direct evidence that international migration flows tend to equilibrate returns across US local labor markets.

We study how maternal stress affects offspring outcomes. We find that in-utero exposure to elevated levels of the stress hormone cortisol negatively affects offspring cognition, health and educational attainment. These findings are based on comparisons between siblings which limits variation to short-lived shocks and controls for unobserved differences between mothers that could bias estimates. Our results are consistent with recent experimental results in the neurobiological literature linking exogenous exposure to stress hormones in-utero with declines in offspring cognitive, behavioral and motor development. Moreover, we find that not only are mothers with low levels of human capital characterized by higher and more variable cortisol levels, but that the negative impact of elevated cortisol on their offspring is greater. These results suggest that maternal stress may play a role in the intergenerational persistence of poverty.

A substantial economics literature documents that tighter alcohol controls reduce alcohol-related harms, but far less is known about mechanisms. We use the universe of Canadian mortality records to document that Canada's Minimum Legal Drinking Age (MLDA) significantly reduces mortality rates of young men but has much smaller effects on women. Using drinking data that are far more detailed than in prior work, we document that the MLDA substantially reduces 'extreme' drinking among men but not women. Our results suggest that alcohol control efforts targeting young adults should focus on reducing extreme drinking behavior.

Women tend to be less financially literate than men, consistent with a division of labor where husbands manage finances. However, women tend to outlive their husbands. I find that older women acquire financial literacy as they approach widowhood - 80 percent would catch up with their husbands by the expected onset of widowhood. These gains are not attributable to husbands' cognitive decline, as captured by cognition tests. The results are consistent with a model in which the division of labor collapses when a spouse dies: women have incentives to delay acquiring financial human capital, but also to begin learning before widowhood.

The events of 9/11 released a million tons of toxic dust into lower Manhattan, an unparalleled environmental disaster. It is puzzling then that the literature has shown little effect of fetal exposure to the dust. However, inference is complicated by pre-existing differences between the affected mothers and other NYC mothers as well as heterogeneity in effects on boys and girls. Using all births in utero on 9/11 in NYC and comparing them to their siblings, we show that residence in the affected area increased prematurity and low birth weight, especially for boys.

This paper examines the relationship between parents' access to family planning and the economic resources of their children. Using the county-level introduction of U.S. family planning programs between 1964 and 1973, we find that children born after programs began had 2.8% higher household incomes. They were also 7% less likely to live in poverty and 12% less likely to live in households receiving public assistance. A bounding exercise suggests that the direct effects of family planning programs on parents' resources account for roughly two-thirds of these gains.