Evidence from different sources shows that spouses' retirement decisions are correlated. Retirement policies affecting individuals in couples are therefore also likely to affect behavior of their spouses. It is therefore important to account for joint features in modeling retirement. This paper...

Several school districts use assignment systems that give students an incentive to misrepresent their preferences. We find evidence consistent with strategic behavior in Cambridge. Such strategizing can complicate preference analysis. This paper develops empirical methods for studying random...

This paper uses firm-level information to evaluate how crises are transmitted internationally. It constructs a new data set of financial statistics, industry information, geographic data, and stock returns for over 10,000 companies in 46 countries to test what types of firms were most affected...

Efforts to estimate the effects of international trade on a country's real income have been hampered by the failure to account for the endogeneity of trade. Frankel and Romer recently use a country's geographic attributes - notably its distance from potential trading partners - as an instrument...

To show how fast Internet affects employment in Africa, we exploit the gradual arrival of submarine Internet cables on the coast and maps of the terrestrial cable network. Robust difference-in-differences estimates from three datasets covering 12 countries show large positive effects on...

Using an uneven panel of 135 countries from 1995 to 2014, we investigate the link between interest rates and private saving, and focus on whether the interest rate effect is dominated by the income (i.e., negative) or the substitution (i.e., positive) effect. With the baseline estimation, we...

One of the most important decisions a student can make during the course of his or her college career is the choice of major. The field of study a student selects translates directly into the types of skills and knowledge he or she will obtain during college, and it can influence the type of...

We study the short-term impact of Connecticut's Jobs First welfare reform experiment on women's labor supply and welfare participation decisions. A non-parametric optimizing model is shown to restrict the set of counterfactual choices compatible with each woman's actual choice. These revealed...

This paper examines how much carbon emissions from the electricity industry would decrease in response to a carbon price. We show how both carbon prices and cheap natural gas reduce, in a nearly identical manner, the historic cost advantage of coal-fired power plants. The shale revolution has...

When the fraction of minorities in a neighborhood exceeds the tipping point white flight accelerates. I develop a revealed-preference method to estimate the tipping points of 38,000 census tracts and the preferences of households for minority neighbors in the 123 Metropolitan Statistical Areas...