This paper documents the puzzling evidence that a substantial number of large public non-financial US firms follow a zero-debt policy. Over the 1962-2009 period, on average 10.2% of such firms have zero debt and almost 22% have less than 5% book leverage ratio. Neither industry nor size can...

One of the most basic predictions of human capital theory is that life expectancy should impact human capital investment. Limited exogenous variation in life expectancy makes this difficult to test, especially in the contexts most relevant to the macroeconomic applications. We estimate the...

Some education policymakers focus on bringing down pupil-teacher ratios. Others argue that resources will have limited impact without systematic reforms to education governance, teacher incentives, and pedagogy. We examine a program under which Kenyan Parent-Teacher Associations (PTAs) at...

We present a theory of context-dependent choice in which a consumer's attention is drawn to salient attributes of goods, such as quality or price. An attribute is salient for a good when it stands out among the good's characteristics, in the precise sense of being furthest away in that good from...

This expository paper describes the factors that contribute to failure of health insurance markets, and the regulatory mechanisms that have been and can be used to combat these failures. Standardized contracts and creditable coverage mandates are discussed, along with premium support, enrollment...

Using a detailed personally-assembled data set on the performance of collegiate and professional basketball players over the 1997-2010 period, we conduct a very direct test of two questions. Does performance in the NCAA "March Madness" college basketball tournament affect NBA teams' draft...

This paper studies the employment and productivity implications of new labor regulations in China. These new restrictions are intended to protect workers' employment conditions by, among other things, increasing firing costs and increasing compensation. We estimate a model of costly labor...

In this paper, I examine changes in international trade associated with the integration of low- and middle-income countries into the global economy. Led by China and India, the share of developing economies in global exports more than doubled between 1994 and 2008. One feature of new trade...

Although both economists and psychometricians typically treat them as interval scales, test scores are reported using ordinal scales. Using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study and the Children of the National Longitudinal Survey, we examine the effect of order-preserving scale transformations...

This paper shows close connections between CEOs' absences from headquarters and corporate news disclosures. I identify CEO absences by merging corporate jet flight histories with records of CEOs' property ownership near leisure destinations. I find that CEOs go to their vacation homes just after...