In Fall 2014, Wellesley College began mandating pass/fail grading for courses taken by first-year, first-semester students, although instructors continued to record letter grades. We identify the causal effect of the policy on course choice and performance, using a...

Developing countries rely on technology created by developed countries. This paper demonstrates that such reliance increases wage inequality but leads to greater production in developing countries. I study a Brazilian innovation program that taxed the leasing of international technology to...

Trade sanctions are a common instrument of diplomatic retaliation. To guide current and future policy, we ask: What is the most cost-efficient way to impose trade sanctions? To answer this question, we build a quantitative model of international trade with input-output connections. Sanctioning...

I show that weather conditions on election day affect future fiscal policy. When it rains during state elections, there is an increase in the relative income of voters, which is followed by an increase in expenditure and debt. The increase in expenditure is directed towards a larger police and...

We add to recent evidence on deindustrialization and document a new pattern: increasing industry polarization over time. We assess whether these new features of structural change can be explained by a dynamic open economy model with two primary driving forces, sector-biased productivity growth...

Two of Peter Schmidt’s many contributions to econometrics have been to introduce a simultaneous logit model for bivariate binary outcomes and to study estimation of dynamic linear fixed effects panel data models using short panels. In this paper, we study a dynamic panel data version of the...

We study the aftermath of the 1968 Washington, DC civil disturbance to illuminate the mechanisms that drive urban redevelopment in the presence of low demand and racial tension. After establishing that civil disturbance property destruction was quasi-random within blocks, we show that destroyed...

We examine the role of universities in knowledge production and industrial change using historical evidence. Political shocks led to a profound pro-science shift in German universities around 1800. To study the consequences, we construct novel microdata. We find that invention and manufacturing...

There is a robust literature documenting the importance of physician practice style (e.g., the propensity to perform certain operations) in explaining outcomes related to patients' physical health. Yet little is known about the role of physicians in explaining patients' mental health outcomes....

Online offerings at traditional brick-and-mortar universities have become common, though some question if online courses can adequately substitute for the in-person college experience. We explore changes in undergraduate online course enrollment at a large, public 4-year system and the impacts...