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...

Obesity rates continue to climb in the US. Recent work explores social factors that may contribute to these trends, including social norms. Most work in this area focuses on adults and older youth, missing key early years. This paper explores obesity peer effects in New York City schools for...

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...

Leveraging the unique context of New York City taxi rides, we estimate that passengers are 25 to 30 percentage points more likely to tip a suggested amount when presented an integer tip suggestion. Moreover, we nd this behavioral response to integer suggestion varies by tip menu placement, fare...

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...

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...