State laws that mandate in-grade retention for struggling readers are widespread in the U.S., covering 34% of public-school third graders in 2023-24. This study investigates the impacts of Michigan's third-grade reading law on subsequent test scores and school progress outcomes for the 2020-21...

Recent attention to the causal identification of spending impacts provides improved estimates of spending outcomes in a variety of circumstances, but the estimates are substantially different across studies. Half of the variation in estimated funding impact on test scores and over three-quarters...

Short-cycle higher education programs (SCPs) can play a central role in skill development and higher education expansion, yet their quality varies greatly within and among countries. In this paper we explore the relationship between programs' practices and inputs (quality determinants) and...

We provide new evidence that cash transfers following the birth of a first child can have large and long-lasting effects on that child's outcomes. We take advantage of the January 1 birthdate cutoff for U.S. child-related tax benefits, which results in families of otherwise similar children...

This paper studies the causal impacts of public universities on the outcomes of their marginally admitted students. I use administrative admission records spanning all 35 public universities in Texas, which collectively enroll 10 percent of American public university students, to systematically...

This paper explores the relationships between air pollution, income, wealth, and race by combining administrative data from U.S. tax returns between 1979-2016, various measures of air pollution, and sociodemographic information from linked survey and administrative data. In the first year of our...

We provide evidence on the role of fairness for tax compliance: households are willing to pay more in taxes if they believe that other households are contributing their fair share. We conducted an information-disclosure natural field experiment in the context of property taxes in the United...

Field experiments provide the clearest window into the true impact of many policies, allowing us to understand what works, what does not, and why. Yet, their widespread use has not been accompanied by a deep understanding of the political economy of their adoption in policy circles. This study...

Nearly all prior work on government outsourcing has focused on the contracting firm's incentives. This paper shows how strong incentive contracts may be insufficient to generate spending reductions (or other desired outcomes) in the presence of a binding technological or managerial constraint....

We analyze the financial performance of a hypothetical portfolio of 120 mRNA vaccine candidates in the preclinical stage targeting 11 emerging infectious diseases. We calibrate the simulation parameters with input from domain experts in mRNA technology and an extensive literature review. We find...