Selected Publications and Working Papers

  • WP 2025

    John Eric Humphries, Christopher Neilson, Xiaoyang Ye, Seth Zimmerman

    This paper asks whether universal pre-kindergarten (UPK) programs can increase parental earnings and, if so, how much these gains affect the economic returns to UPK. Using admissions lotteries for an extended-day UPK program in New Haven, Connecticut, we find that UPK enrollment increases childcare coverage to span the workday and raises parents' earnings by 21.7% during pre-kindergarten. Gains persist for at least six years. We find little evidence of effects on children's academic and behavioral outcomes during elementary and middle school. Combining these results, we demonstrate that tax revenues from parents' earnings gains reduce the net government costs of UPK by 90% relative to estimates that ignore gains for parents. Overall, we estimate that each dollar spent yields $10 in benefits. Our findings demonstrate the potential of UPK programs that combine quality education with full-day childcare and underscore the importance of thinking about parents when designing and evaluating early-childhood policies.

  • WP 2025

    John Eric Humphries, Aurelie Ouss, Megan Stevenson, Kamelia Stavreva, Winnie van Dijk

    Noncarceral conviction is a common outcome of criminal court cases: for every individual incarcerated, there are approximately three who are recently convicted but not sentenced to prison or jail. We develop an empirical framework for studying the consequences of noncarceral conviction by extending the binary-treatment judge IV framework to settings with multiple treatments. We outline assumptions under which widely-used 2SLS regressions recover margin-specific treatment effects, relate these assumptions to models of judge decision-making, and derive an expression that provides intuition about the direction and magnitude of asymptotic bias when they are not met. Under the identifying assumptions, we find that noncarceral conviction (relative to dismissal) leads to a large and long-lasting increase in recidivism for felony defendants in Virginia. In contrast, incarceration relative to noncarceral conviction leads to a short-run reduction in recidivism, consistent with incapacitation. While the identifying assumptions include a strong restriction on judge decision-making, we argue that any bias resulting from its failure is unlikely to change our qualitative conclusions. Lastly, we introduce an alternative empirical strategy, and find that it yields similar estimates. Collectively, these results suggest that noncarceral felony conviction is an important and potentially overlooked driver of recidivism.

    [Accepted at the Quarterly Journal of Economics]

  • WP 2024

    Robert Collinson, Stephanie Kestelmann, Scott Nelson, Winnie van Dijk, and Daniel Waldinger

    “Right-to-counsel” programs provide free legal assistance to tenants in eviction court. Legal assistance can delay or prevent eviction. However, large-scale legal assistance programs can also generate costs for tenants due to equilibrium rental market responses. In this paper, we study how right to counsel impacts rental markets when implemented at scale, and quantify the policy's impact on tenant welfare. Leveraging the geographic rollout of New York City's program, we find listed rent prices rose by $22-$38/month within two years of policy implementation, with larger increases in areas with higher baseline eviction rates. We do not find evidence that landlords adjusted on other margins, such as tenant screening or improvements to habitability. Guided by these results, we develop a framework to evaluate the policy's welfare implications for tenants, incorporating the trade-off between protection from eviction and higher rent prices. We quantify the parameters of our framework using linked data on eviction court cases, rental housing listings, and tenant earnings trajectories. Despite the direct benefits and insurance value of stronger eviction protections, the estimated price increases are large enough to generate a small net reduction in ex-ante tenant welfare.

    [Revise and Resubmit at the American Economic Review]

  • AEA P&P 2024

    John Eric Humphries, Juanna Schroter Joensen, and Gregory F. Veramendi

    There is a large gender wage gap among college graduates. This gender gap could be partially driven by differences in college major and prior skills. We use Swedish register data to study how much of the gender gap can be explained by differences in majors, skills, and skill prices. College majors explain 60 percent of the gender wage gap, but large gaps remain within majors. We find that within-major wage gaps are driven by neither differences in multidimensional skills nor returns to these skills. In fact, women are positively selected in terms of college preparation and skills in almost every major.

  • QJE 2024

    Robert Collinson, John Eric Humphries, Nicholas Mader, Davin Reed, Daniel Tannenbaum, Winnie van Dijk

    More than two million U.S. households have an eviction case filed against them each year. Policymakers at the federal, state, and local levels are increasingly pursuing policies to reduce the number of evictions, citing harm to tenants and high public expenditures related to homelessness. We study the consequences of eviction for tenants using newly linked administrative data from two major urban areas: Cook County (which includes Chicago) and New York City. We document that prior to housing court, tenants experience declines in earnings and employment and increases in financial distress and hospital visits. These pre-trends pose a challenge for disentangling correlation and causation. To address this problem, we use an instrumental variables approach based on cases randomly assigned to judges of varying leniency. We find that an eviction order increases homelessness and hospital visits and reduces earnings, durable goods consumption, and access to credit in the first two years. Effects on housing and labor market outcomes are driven by impacts for female and Black tenants. In the longer-run, eviction increases indebtedness and reduces credit scores.
  • JPE 2018

    James J. Heckman, John Eric Humphries,and Gregory Veramendi, published in the Journal of Political Economy, 2018.

    This paper estimates returns to education using a dynamic model of educational choice that synthesizes approaches in the structural dynamic discrete choice literature with approaches used in the reduced form treatment effect literature. It is an empirically robust middle ground between the two approaches which estimates economically interpretable and policy-relevant dynamic treatment effects that account for heterogeneity in cognitive and non-cognitive skills and the continuation values of educational choices. Graduating college is not a wise choice for all. Ability bias is a major component of observed educational differentials. For some, there are substantial causal effects of education at all stages of schooling.