AN NBER PUBLICATION
ISSUE: No. 8, August 2001
The Digest
A free monthly publication featuring non-technical summaries of research on topics of broad public interest
Head Start generates long-term improvements in important outcomes such as schooling attainment, earnings, and crime reduction.
Begun in 1965 as a summer program for disadvantaged children, Head Start has grown into a school-year preschool program enrolling more than 800,000 disadvantaged children at a cost of about $5,400 per child. Because Head Start was designed as an early intervention to remedy deficiencies that handicap disadvantaged children when they start...
Article
Baily and Lawrence assert that the change in TFP growth between 1995 and 2000 was primarily structural, not cyclical.
Despite skepticism about both the stock market boom of the 1990s and the influence of technological innovation, Martin Baily and Robert Lawrence believe that the new economy is real. In Do We Have A New E-conomy? (NBER Working Paper No. 8243), they claim that there has been a structural acceleration of total factor productivity (TFP), caused by...
Article
The more firmly 'poor people' believe in the chance of bettering their economic situation, the less likely their commitment to the notion of government intervention in wealth redistribution.
How concerned are citizens about inequality of income and how much do they support the government redistributing wealth as a means of reducing social inequality? There are significant differences between Europeans and Americans on these subjects, largely based on how the citizenry...
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An increase in corruption from the level of Singapore to that of Mexico would have the same negative effect on...foreign investment as raising the marginal corporate tax by 50 percentage points.
Rampant public corruption in emerging market countries may contribute to the currency crises that have racked the developing world, because corruption acts to repel more stable forms of foreign investment and leaves countries dependent on volatile foreign loans to finance...