There is growing concern that it is too difficult or costly to substantially improve the academic skills of children who are behind in school once they reach adolescence. But perhaps what we have tried in the past relies on the wrong interventions, failing to account for challenges like the...

We explore a key underlying assumption, the exclusion restriction, commonly used in interpreting IV estimates in the presence of heterogenous treatment effects as a local average treatment effect (LATE). We show through a series of simple examples that in some commonly featured cases that this...

Over three-quarters of US taxpayers receive income tax refunds, indicating tax prepayments above the level of tax liability. This amounts to a zero interest loan to the government. Previous studies have suggested two main explanations for this behavior: precautionary behavior in light of tax...

Do men negatively respond when women first enter an occupation? We answer this question by studying the end of one of the final explicit occupational barriers to women in the U.S.: in 2016, the U.S. military opened all positions to women, including historically male-only combat occupations. We...

Combining administrative data from the U.S. Army, Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and the U.S. Social Security Administration, we analyze the effect of the VA's Disability Compensation (DC) program on veterans' labor force participation and earnings. The largely unstudied Disability...

Army cadets obtain occupations through a centralized process. Three objectives - increasing retention, aligning talent, and enhancing trust - have guided reforms to this process since 2006. West Point's mechanism for the Class of 2020 exacerbated challenges implementing Army policy aims. We...

This paper estimates the value of a statistical life (VSL), or the willingness to trade-off wealth and mortality risk, among 430,000 U.S. Army soldiers choosing whether to reenlist between 2002 and 2010. Using a discrete choice random utility approach and significant variation in retention...

As millions of soldiers deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan between 2001 and 2021, Veteran Affairs Disability Compensation payments quadrupled and the veteran suicide rate rose rapidly. We estimate causal effects of combat deployments on soldiers' well-being. To eliminate non-random selection into...

This paper estimates causal intergenerational occupation transmission in the military using discontinuities in parents' eligibility for service from the Armed Forces Qualification Test. A parent's enlistment in the Army increases their children's military service propensity by between 58% and...

We conduct a field experiment designed to test theories of time-inconsistency, namely a "Beta-Delta" model of present bias. The experiment takes place in the context of a saving decision made by low-income tax filers who can deposit their income tax refund into an illiquid account. We find...