Most parents whose children receive Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits overestimate the likelihood that their child will receive SSI benefits in adulthood; further, reducing parents’ expectations that children will receive benefits in adulthood does not increase investments in children’s human capital.

Incarceration generates short-term drops in economic activity, but has limited long-run impacts. Why? Most defendants’ challenges in the labor market begin long before they first enter prison.

Among low-wage workers, job loss causes a 13% reduction in earnings six years later and over $40,000 cumulative lost earnings, mostly due to reductions in employment and hours. Comparable losses for workers earning $15-$30 per hour are driven by wage reductions.

One of the most influential ideas to arise out of recent economic research is the notion that people’s ability to move up the income ladder over generations is heavily influenced by where they live. If you reside in certain areas of the US Southeast, for example, you will experience less upward mobility than if, say, you live in certain areas of the Great Plains. Further, these variations occur at a neighborhood level, such that if you live in a city, for example, you will experience differences in intergenerational mobility depending on where you live within that city. In other words, location is destiny, at least on average.

From 2019 to early 2023, the share of job postings offering remote work for one or more days per week rose more than three-fold in the United States and by a factor of five or more in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom.

Work from home saved about two hours per week per worker in 2021 and 2022, and will likely save about one hour per week per worker after the pandemic ends; workers allocate 40 percent of time savings to work and about 11 percent to caregiving activities.

Of the many decisions facing high school students—and their parents—few loom larger than whether and where to attend college. Families with college-bound children often go to great lengths to ensure admission into a “good” school. But do colleges with successful graduates actually contribute to their students’ success, or simply enroll the types of students who would do well no matter where they attend?