The recession of 2007-09 witnessed high rates of unemployment that have been slow to recede. This has led many to conclude that structural changes have occurred in the labor market and that the economy will not return to the low rates of unemployment that prevailed in the recent past. Is this...

Significant income gains from migrating from poorer to richer countries have motivated unilateral (source-country) policies facilitating labor emigration. However, their effectiveness is unknown. We conducted a large-scale randomized experiment in the Philippines testing the impact of...

Several school districts use assignment systems in which students have a strategic incentive to misrepresent their preferences. Indeed, we find evidence suggesting that reported preferences in Cambridge, MA respond to these incentives. Such strategizing can complicate the analysis of...

We investigate the effects of broad-based work incentives on female crime by exploiting the welfare reform legislation of the 1990s, which dramatically increased employment among women at risk for relying on cash assistance. We find that welfare reform decreased female property crime arrests by...

Collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and private-label mortgage-backed securities (MBS) backed by nonprime loans played a central role in the recent financial crisis. Little is known, however, about the underlying forces that drove investor demand for these securitizations. Using micro-data on...

This paper estimates the impact of armed conflict on subsequent health outcomes using detailed geographic information on households’ distance from conflict sites—a more accurate measure of conflict exposure— and compares the impact on children exposed in utero versus after birth. The...

We study the effects of credit shocks in a model with heterogeneous entrepreneurs, financing constraints, and a realistic firm size distribution. As entrepreneurial firms can grow only slowly and rely heavily on retained earnings to expand the size of their business in this set-up, we show that,...

In this paper, we describe the evolution of the Federal Reserve’s swap lines from their inception in 1962 as a mechanism to forestall claims on U.S gold reserves under Bretton Woods to a means of extending emergency dollar liquidity during the Great Recession. We describe a number of...

We construct factors from a cross section of exchange rates and use the idiosyncratic deviations from the factors to forecast. In a stylized data generating process, we show that such forecasts can be effective even if there is essentially no serial correlation in the univariate exchange rate...

The special legal status of Indian tribes in the U.S. means that state excise taxes are not necessarily collected on cigarette purchases on Indian reservations. We focus on two under-studied but basic empirical economic questions this raises. Using novel data from New York surveys that asked...