In Project STAR, 11,571 students in Tennessee and their teachers were randomly assigned to classrooms within their schools from kindergarten to third grade. This article evaluates the long-term impacts of STAR by linking the experimental data to administrative records. We first demonstrate that...

The debate about behavioral economics – the incorporation of insights from psychology into economics – is often framed as a question about the foundational assumptions of economic models. This paper presents a more pragmatic perspective on behavioral economics that focuses on its value for...

Macroeconomic calibrations imply much larger labor supply elasticities than microeconometric studies. The most well known explanation for this divergence is that indivisible labor generates extensive margin responses that are not captured in micro studies of hours choices. We evaluate whether...

We use administrative records on the incomes of more than 40 million children and their parents to describe three features of intergenerational mobility in the United States. First, we characterize the joint distribution of parent and child income at the national level. The conditional...

We conducted a randomized experiment with 43,000 EITC recipients at H&R Block. Tax preparers gave simple, personalized information about the EITC schedule to half of their clients. We find no significant effects of information provision on earnings in the subsequent year in the full sample....

We survey the literature on social insurance, focusing on recent work that has connected theory to evidence to make quantitative statements about welfare and optimal policy. Our review contains two parts. We first discuss motives for government intervention in private insurance markets, focusing...

We evaluate policies to increase prosocial behavior using a field experiment with 1,500 referees at the Journal of Public Economics. We randomly assign referees to four groups: a control group with a six-week deadline to submit a referee report; a group with a four-week deadline; a cash incentive...

We present new evidence on trends in intergenerational mobility in the United States using administrative earnings records. We find that percentile rank-based measures of intergenerational mobility have remained extremely stable for the 1971–1993 birth cohorts. For children born between 1971...

Are teachers' impacts on students' test scores ("value-added") a good measure of their quality? This question has sparked debate partly because of a lack of evidence on whether high value-added (VA) teachers improve students' long-term outcomes. Using school district and tax records for more...