To identify causal effects of women’s entry into paid professional work, this project exploits historical teacher certification exams as a quasi-random barrier into one of the early white-collar occupations available to women. By linking teacher-exam records to census data and applying a regression discontinuity design around passing thresholds, the study estimates how access to the teaching profession affected women’s labor-market outcomes, marriage, and fertility.

Many Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) claimants pay for tax preparation services they could obtain free and more accurately through VITA (Volunteer Income Tax Assistance). In Michigan, only 1.4% of EITC returns use VITA while 49% use paid preparers, who often face no competency standards. This study uses a field experiment to understand why low-income households choose paid preparers despite higher costs and error rates, and to test whether targeted information about VITA’s availability, quality, and convenience shifts behavior.

This paper investigates how the early-20th-century expansion of mail-order kit housing—factory-produced home kits sold and shipped by rail—changed towns’ access to homeownership and long-term intergenerational outcomes. Using newly digitized data on kit-housing firm mill locations, firm sales records, and full-count census data, the study exploits spatial variation in transportation costs to identify exogenous differences in access to kit housing across towns.

School hours often misalign with parents’ workdays, leaving gaps in childcare for school-age children. This study focuses on how increased afterschool care availability affects mothers’ employment, earnings, and full-time work. It leverages variation from competitive 21st Century Community Learning Center Grants—federal funds awarded to expand afterschool programs—and links grant data to restricted administrative records.

Early jobs shape immigrants’ long-term economic trajectories. U.S. refugee policy emphasizes rapid employment, but many newcomers enter sectors with limited mobility. This project studies whether early access to warehouse employment—an expanding, immigrant-heavy employer—promotes upward mobility or entrenches low-wage attachment. Exploiting the staggered openings of large warehouse facilities across U.S. cities (2005–2025), the study uses a staggered difference-in-differences design to estimate impacts of early warehouse exposure on employment, earnings, and career mobility.

This study probes whether perceived racial discrimination among Black Americans predicts worse labor-market outcomes, and whether “financial trauma” (severe financial shocks and setbacks) mediates that relationship. Using Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) data from 2005–2015 and structural modeling, the analysis finds that financial trauma substantially lowers earnings and employment probability, while self-reported discrimination does not systematically predict greater financial trauma within the Black community.

About one quarter of U.S. physicians trained abroad. Over the 1960s–1970s, more than 30 state medical boards removed citizenship requirements for licensure, creating a large, exogenous policy shift. Using a newly digitized, individual-level dataset of all U.S. physicians and a staggered difference-in-differences design that leverages the quasi-random timing of reforms, this project measures how removing citizenship barriers affected the recruitment, retention, and geographic distribution of foreign-trained physicians.

Established by the Housing Act of 1949, the urban renewal program authorized the use of eminent domain to acquire and clear areas deemed “blighted.” Between 1949 and 1973, the federal government approved over 2,500 urban renewal projects in almost 1,200 cities in all 50 states. Estimates vary, but by 1971, approximately 500,000 households with 1.4 million individuals were displaced by the program, with African American neighborhoods disproportionately affected. Little is known about the long-run impacts of these interventions on those affected.

Since the mid-1990s, work requirements have become central to major public assistance programs in the U.S. Despite the long history of these policies, there is little evidence to inform debates about the consequences of conditioning public benefits on work.