Despite a decade-long bull market between the financial crisis and the COVID-19 recession, state DB pension plans had accrued more than $1.37 trillion in unfunded liabilities. However, little work has investigated the actuarial sources of these unfunded liabilities. This paper uses original data...

Adequately saving for retirement requires both planning and knowledge about available retirement savings options. Teachers participate in a complex set of different plan designs and benefit tiers, and many do not participate in Social Security. While teachers represent a large part of the public...

Using daily lunch transaction data from NYC public schools, I determine which students frequently stand next to one another in the lunch line. I use this `revealed' friendship network to estimate academic peer effects in elementary school classrooms, improving on previous work by defining not...

This paper presents new evidence on how UI (Unemployment Insurance) benefit pay frequencies affect the job search behaviors of UI claimants in the United States. By exploiting quasi-experimental variations in states' benefit pay schedules, I find that switching from biweekly to weekly pay...

We identify and estimate the effects of student-level social spillovers on standardized test performance in New York City (NYC) elementary schools. We leverage student demographic data to construct within-classroom social networks based on shared student characteristics, such as a gender or...

Many states enhanced benefits in teacher retirement plans during the 1990s. This paper examines the school staffing effects of one such enhancement in a major urban school district with mostly high poverty schools. Pension rule changes in 1999 for St. Louis public school teachers resulted in...

Objectives: Determine community characteristics, within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, based on travel to the popular leisure destination, Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri, and racial-justice protest locations in St. Louis, Missouri during key dates in May 2020.Methods: Travel data was...

Objective: Identifying geographic-level prevalence of occupations associated with mobility during local stay-at-home pandemic mandate.Methods: A spatio-temporal ecological framework was applied to determine census-tracts that had significantly higher rates of occupations likely to be deemed...

The 2020-2021 academic year was a trying year for teachers. We use a nationally representative sample of teachers from the RAND American Teacher Panel to document that teachers’ stated consideration of leaving the profession increased during the pandemic. We also study factors associated with...

This paper is a descriptive analysis of the 2009 Missouri public high school freshman cohort who were tracked though high school and into post-secondary education for six years beyond on-time graduation in Spring 2014. Our focus is post-secondary degree attainment gaps between four student...