This article studies intergenerational socioeconomic mobility in Mexico comparing men and women. In contrast to most sociological work that uses individual-level measures to proxy family socioeconomic status, we use a direct measure of family living standards for both generations, based on an index of economic well-being. Strong intergenerational persistence is found in Mexico compared to other countries. Persistence is stronger for men than women, particularly among advantaged families.

Research suggests that prenatal exposure to environmental stressors has negative effects after birth. However, capturing causal effects is difficult because exposed women may be selected on unobserved factors. We use the 2006 Israel–Hezbollah war as a natural experiment and a siblings fixed-effects methodology to address unobserved selectivity by comparing exposed and unexposed births of the same mother. Findings indicate that exposure to war in early and mid-pregnancy lowers birth weight and increases the probability of low birth weight.

We develop an agency model explaining why third-party information reporting by firms makes tax enforcement successful. While third-party reporting would be ineffective with frictionless collusion between firms and employees, collusive evasion is impossible to sustain in firms with many employees and accurate business records as any single employee may reveal evasion. We embed our agency model into a macro model where the number of employees grows with development, showing that the tax take evolves as an S-shape driven by changes in third-party information.

In recent years, private for-profit education has been the fastest growing segment of the U.S. postsecondary system. Traditional hiring models suggest that employers clearly and efficiently evaluate college credentials, but this changing institutional landscape raises an important question: How do employers assess credentials from emerging institutions?

Millions of workers are employed in positions that deviate from the full-time, standard employment relationship or work in jobs that are mismatched with their skills, education, or experience. Yet, little is known about how employers evaluate workers who have experienced these employment arrangements, limiting our knowledge about how part-time work, temporary agency employment, and skills underutilization affect workers’ labor market opportunities.