Whether imposing higher taxes on business owners adversely affects business activity by constraining investment and inducing capitalist flight is a central question in the ongoing debate on how to tax the ultra wealthy…
Area-level measures of economic opportunity are increasingly used to guide place-based policies. We study whether these measures predict long-run outcomes for a vulnerable population: over 12,000 refugee children…
How do depopulation and population aging evolve differently across regions within a country, and what are their implications for aggregate economic activity and regional inequality? Using spatially disaggregated data…
Do early investments in parents pay off even when treatment effects for children appear to fade out quickly? We answer this question by leveraging a field experiment in which households with 3-5 year-old children were…
We characterize the size of the range of multiple equilibria in sovereign debt markets. We show that the nature of the equilibrium depends crucially on the degree of uncertainty, which we formalize first as uncertainty…
We study strategic responses by firms to threshold-based regulations. We document extensive bunching in response to additional staffing requirements for California nursing homes with at least 100 beds. To estimate the…
Licensure sales requirements are commonly justified as consumer protection regulations intended to improve seller compliance and reduce harm associated with risky products. However, licensure effects may differ across…
We study an accelerated 3-year math curriculum offered in the middle schools of a large urban district that enables students to finish Algebra I and Geometry before high school. Entry to the program is based on…
As prediction markets become more prominent, there are concerns that they will be a conduit for political bias. I analyze prediction markets returns from 1880 to 2025 and find no evidence of an overpricing of either…
PredictIt is a CFTC-regulated US prediction market focused on political outcomes. It was very successful in attracting participants in the 2016-22 period, running liquid markets on topics predecessors had tried…
This paper studies the utilization of dental services during the recent implementation of an adult (age 21 and over) Medicaid dental benefit in West Virginia. We analyze claims data and find: 1) before implementation…
Complementarities can have important welfare consequences, but quantifying these effects would seem to require identifying and valuing the underlying mechanisms separately. This paper shows that this need not be the…
Does education lead to political activity? We find that a large, early 20th century school construction program, the Rosenwald schools, led to more NAACP branches in the rural South starting in the early 1940s, i.e…
An advertiser in a second-price auction sees what it paid, not the rival bids that supposedly set the price. Akbarpour and Li (2020) show that an auctioneer can therefore charge a winner up to its bid undetected. The…
Short-term return reversal is one of the most robust asset-pricing anomalies, and is commonly linked to liquidity provision. We decompose individual firm stock returns into two distinct components: SYS, the component of…
Large language models (LLMs) increasingly provide economic and financial advice. We develop a microeconomic framework for understanding this role. We prove that an LLM acts like a voting rule: each input text is an…
When does bad news stick? This paper shows that the persistence of media sentiment depends not only on whether news is good or bad, but also on what the news is about. Using the complete Wall Street Journal archive from…
We study how information about school quality affects families’ choices and how scaling up the intervention changes its impact. In a randomized trial in Chile, we offer families a short video and a personalized school…
We estimate the causal effects of a financial windfall on consumption, savings, and wage earnings using linked administrative data on a large sample of Canadian lottery winners. Using separate linkages of lottery…
We provide evidence on the extent to which food assistance affects spending on sugary items by studying the Pandemic Electronic Benefit Transfer (P-EBT) program, which provided funds to families of children who lost…
A critical tension in global governance is that trade agreements have evolved largely in isolation from climate policy. This paper shows that the two domains generate systematic cross-externalities: larger gains from…
Alcohol use, transactional sex, and gambling carry significant health and economic consequences. We conducted a randomized controlled trial in Kenya to assess whether these behaviors could be altered with a savings…
This article presents inference for regression with data that are correlated across some measure of distance; most often geographic distance. Failure to appropriately adjust standard errors can lead to confidence…
Many regression analyses use observations that are correlated within uncorrelated clusters and/or are correlated in distance or other spatial measure. Such data are often positively correlated. This reduces the…