We study the post-World War II "Golden Age" of American corporate research from 1945 to 1980, using multiple indicators of corporate research activity. We use an ensemble learning approach to classify firms as either Science Leaders, Absorbers or Followers. Our analysis reveals that only a small...

In the approaching era of genomic medicine, the underrepresentation of minority populations in human genetics and genomics research has raised growing concerns regarding the distributive justice in the translation of biomedical innovations into human health across populations. Quantitative...

Subsidies and in-kind transfers give rise to negative fiscal externalities. However, internalizing negative fiscal externalities through taxation would undo the subsidy or in-kind transfer that caused them. Similarly, positive fiscal externalities cannot be internalized though government...

Starting from Robbins (1952), the literature on experimentation via multi-armed bandits has wed exploration and exploitation. Nonetheless, in many applications, agents' exploration and exploitation need not be intertwined: a policymaker may assess new policies different than the status quo; an...

This paper uses a large language model to develop an ex-ante measure of the commercial potential of scientific findings. In addition to validating the measure against the typical holdout sample, we validate it externally against 1.) the progression of scientific findings through a major...

Operation Warp Speed (OWS) was a U.S. government-led program to accelerate the development, production, and administration of COVID-19 vaccines. The program cut the typical ten-year timeline needed to develop a new vaccine down to ten months and began vaccinating vulnerable populations within a...

More than 1,500 organizations and investors representing over $40 trillion in assets have committed to fossil fuel divestment to combat climate change. Will it work? This chapter explores whether divestment might induce green innovation, a critical component of transitioning to a cleaner...

We study the effects of job-protected leave policies on intergenerational mobility, long-run child outcomes, and parental decisions (labor market, investments in children, and fertility). We merge rich sources of historical information on family leave policies across the United States since 1973...

We study the effects of an unconditional cash transfer program on social preferences of children. The program allocated $1,076 to randomly selected households in rural Kenya. We measure the social preferences of 4,022 children from 1,687 households with survey questions and incentivized...

We estimate the effects of cash transfers on a severe measure of child welfare: maltreatment. To do so, we leverage year-to-year household variation from a universal and unconditional cash transfer, the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD). Using linked individual-level administrative data on...