Mangroves provide vital ecosystem services like storm surge protection and carbon sequestration, but their coverage is rapidly declining. This study evaluates an environmental education program in the Dominican Republic, targeting children's attitudes, knowledge, behaviors, and willingness to...

We examine the impact of encouragement emails sent to high-performing students in a principles of microeconomics course at a large state university, aimed at motivating them to take additional economics courses and consider an economics major or minor. Using a regression discontinuity design, we...

Exams are designed to rank students objectively by their abilities, including elements such as time limits, the number and difficulty of questions, and negative marking policies. Using data from a lab-in-field experiment, we develop and estimate a model of student behavior in multiple-choice...

We examine the effect of a representative pension reform on the retention and productivity of workers. The reform cut pension annuities and early retirement benefits for public school teachers, projected to save eight percent of pension revenues. We leverage administrative records and a...

Income inequality is important, but attempts to measure it arrive at strikingly different conclusions. Why? We use recent disputes over measuring United States income inequality to return to first principles about both the income concept and inequality measurement. We emphasize two broad points....

This paper examines partisanship in public perceptions of the Federal Reserve. In all years from 2001 through 2023, trust in the Federal Reserve was highest for respondents of the same party as the President. The partisan effects were larger than other demographic differences in trust, but do...

Are defined contribution (DC) pension funds' capital flows sensitive to performance? We examine pressures from individual account holders who can switch their pension managers. Using novel data on retirement accounts for nearly 10 million individuals, we analyze switching behavior based on the...

The decline in housing affordability over recent decades has promoted an enhanced interest in housing supply. This chapter presents descriptive evidence about the evolution of us housing prices, quantities, and regulations since 1980, indicating that supply constraints appear to be increasingly...

This paper presents a holistic view of the channels of political influence of large corporations in modern democracies, focusing not only on well-studied instruments, such as campaign contributions and lobbying, but also on more opaque ones, such as charitable giving, political connections, dark...

We estimate the effect of social media deactivation on users' emotional state in two large randomized experiments before the 2020 U.S. election. People who deactivated Facebook for the six weeks before the election reported a 0.060 standard deviation improvement in an index of happiness,...