Going to college has consistently conferred a large wage premium. We show that the relative premium received by lower-income Americans has halved since 1960. We decompose this steady rise in ...

This paper studies the causal impacts of public universities on the outcomes of their marginally admitted students. I use administrative admission records spanning all 35 public universities in Texas, ...

Recent empirical evidence by Fieldhouse and Mertens (2024) points to a strong causal link between federal nondefense R&D funding and private-sector productivity growth, and large implied social ...

We show better-managed firms are more dynamic in plant acquisitions, disposals, openings and closings in U.S. Census and international data. Better-managed firms also birth better-managed plants and ...

Nearly a third of American children experience parental divorce before adulthood. To understand its consequences, we use linked tax and Census records for over 5 million children to examine how ...

We examine how the well-being of those with few resources changed, amidst economic disruption and large, transitory government transfers. We find that in the years leading up to the pandemic and in ...

What sparked humanity’s leap from stagnation to prosperity? What lies at the core of inequality among nations? Unified Growth Theory explores the evolution of societies over the entire course of human ...

We use high-resolution spatial data to build a novel global annual gridded GDP dataset at 1°, 0.5°, and 0.25° resolutions from 2012 onward. Our random forest model trained on local and national GDP ...

We examine the labor market effects of AI chatbots using two large-scale adoption surveys (late 2023 and 2024) covering 11 exposed occupations (25,000 workers, 7,000 workplaces), linked to matched ...

Trade and industrial policies, while primarily intended to support domestic industries, may unintentionally stimulate technological progress abroad. We document this mechanism in the case of rare ...

We investigate how advisors’ own health and survival assessments, and information about their advisees’ health and survival probabilities, shape their recommendations regarding retirement spending and ...

We provide new evidence using a matched difference-in-differences design in rich administrative data from New Zealand. While most outcomes remain stable prior to separation, parents' mental health ...