HCEO

Why do schools differ in a system with tuition-free education, equalized school spending and a standardized curriculum? Because parents sort themselves into neighborhoods with better peer, teacher, and school value-added characteristics, new research from Sadegh Eshaghnia, James J. Heckman (The Heckman Equation), and Goya Razavi shows.

cehd.uchicago.edu

Does addiction to ci******es reduce educational attainment? Does education impact cigarette addiction? Our director, James J. Heckman (The Heckman Equation), and Rong Hai show that education causally reduces smoking — and if we could eliminate smoking as a choice, college attendance rates would rise by 2 percentage points.

The Causal Effects of Youth Cigarette Addiction and Education | Journal of Political Economy: Vol 134, No 5 We develop and estimate a life-cycle model of addiction in which forward-looking youth choose to smoke, attend school, work part-time, and consume while facing borrowing constraints. The model features multiple channels for studying the reciprocal causal effects of addiction and education. Variation...

Early childcare attendance boosts academic performance later in grades 5 and 9, a new working paper from HCEO member Costas Meghir shows. Starting childcare one year earlier increases math scores by 9.7% of a standard deviation in grade 9. It also improves math outcomes for children of mothers who did not complete high school and benefits the children of immigrants.

Early Childcare Attendance and Cognitive skills in Adolescence Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals.