The 911 system, a vital component of public safety, responds to over 210 million emergency calls each year. We examine the effect of small exogenous public health stressors - pollen emissions - on the operation of the 911 call system in Seattle, Washington. Leveraging daily variation in pollen...

Early childhood in developing countries faces a greater prevalence of risk factors and limited resources, underscoring the need for effective, scalable support models. We develop and experimentally evaluate a multi-component approach to enhance family well-being over-the-phone. The program...

This paper studies the causes and consequences of the adoption of technology by hospitals and public emergency response systems, focusing on Basic and Enhanced 911 services. Basic 911 allows people within a given locality to access specialized call-takers and ambulance dispatchers using the...

AT&T was the largest U.S. firm for most of the 20th century. Telephone operators once comprised over 50% of its workforce, but in the late 1910s it initiated a decades-long process of automating telephone operation with mechanical call switching--a technology first invented in the 1880s. We...

Two innovations in the last century have changed dramatically the cost of communicating and transmitting information: The first is the widespread adoption of telephony; the second is the internet. We study the implications of these changes in ICT for urban structure. We find robust evidence that...