We examine individuals’ decisions to attend protests during the summer of 2020. Our analysis examines two simultaneous movements: Black Lives Matter along with protests calling for less stringent public health measures to combat the COVID-19 (e.g., for swifter reopening of businesses). Our...

We examine individuals' decision to attend Black Lives Matter protests and demonstrations calling for less stringent public health measures to combat COVID-19 (e.g., for swifter reopening of businesses). Our analysis is facilitated by a unique staggered panel data set originally constructed to...

Facing unprecedented uncertainty and drastic trade-offs between public health and other forms of human well-being, policy makers during the Covid-19 pandemic have sought the guidance of epidemiologists and economists. Unfortunately, while both groups of scientists use many of the same basic...

A puzzling feature of entrepreneurship is that many individuals are self-employed even though they would earn more in paid employment. To shed light on this puzzle, we examine the role of personality traits in determining entrepreneurial decisions and earnings. We estimate a model in which...

Health-maximizing and welfare-maximizing behaviors can be at odds, especially among disadvantaged groups, generating health disparities. We estimate a lifecycle model of medication and labor supply decisions using data on HIV-positive men. We evaluate an effective HIV treatment innovation that...

Despite the fact that flexible spending accounts (FSAs) are becoming an increasingly popular employer-provided health benefit, there has been very little empirical study of FSA use among employees at the individual level. This study contributes to the literature on FSAs through the use of a...

Scientists and engineers in small firms are far more likely than their large firm counterparts to enter entrepreneurship, a phenomenon we label the small firm effect. We explore the origins of this small firm effect, identify four classes of explanations - preference sorting, ability sorting,...

Many randomized experiments are plagued by attrition, even among subjects receiving more effective treatments. We estimate the subject's utility associated with the receipt of treatment, as revealed by dropout behavior, to evaluate treatment effects. Utility is a function of both "publicly...

This paper identifies and evaluates rationales for team participation and for the effects of team composition on productivity using novel data from a garment plant that shifted from individual piece rate to group piece rate production over three years. The adoption of teams at the plant improved...