Between 2011 and 2014, Texas enacted three pieces of legislation that significantly reduced funding for family planning services and increased restrictions on abortion clinic operations. Together this legislation creates cross-county variation in access to abortion and family planning services,...

This paper characterizes the link between ambient temperatures and a broad set of mental health outcomes. We find that higher temperatures increase emergency department visits for mental illness, suicides, and self-reported days of poor mental health. Specifically, cold temperatures reduce...

Vaccination represents a canonical example of externalities in economics, yet there are few estimates of their magnitudes. I estimate social and externality benefits of influenza vaccination in two settings. First, using a natural experiment, I estimate the impacts of aggregate vaccination rates...

Differential access to health care is commonly cited as a source of heterogeneity in the health effects of environmental exposure, yet little causal evidence exists to support such claims. We test this hypothesis by utilizing exogenous variation in both access to health care and environmental...

To boost college graduation rates, policymakers often advocate for academic supports such as coaching or mentoring. Proactive and intensive coaching interventions are effective, but are costly and difficult to scale. We evaluate a relatively lower-cost group coaching program targeted at...

We examine the impact of US colleges and universities switching from an academic quarter calendar to a semester calendar on student outcomes. Using panel data on the near universe of four-year nonprofit institutions and leveraging quasi-experimental variation in calendars across institutions and...

We conducted a randomized controlled trial testing the effect of modest incentives to attend the gym among new members of a fitness facility, a population that is already engaged in trying to change a health behavior. Our experiment randomized 836 new members of a private gym into a control...

How do peers influence the impact of incentives? Despite much work on incentives, little is known about the spillover effects of incentives. We investigate two mechanisms by which these effects can occur: through peers' actions and peers' incentives. In a field experiment on snack choice (grapes...

Most of the existing evidence on the effectiveness of family leave policies comes from studies focusing on their impacts on affected families – that is, mothers, fathers, and their children – without a clear understanding of the costs and effects on firms and coworkers. We use data from...