To improve public services, public sector managers must encourage reticent civil servants to enact effective reforms. We show through a randomized controlled trial that school principals, i.e., school mangers, can act as leaders to improve Instructional Management (0.3SD) and student learning...

Previous research has shown that women in the treatment group of the CeMENT randomized controlled trial increased their publications and the likelihood that they were tenured in top 50 economics departments. This paper examines one potential mechanism, namely, that CeMENT expanded the...

This paper extends my research applying statistical decision theory to treatment choice with sample data, using maximum regret to evaluate the performance of treatment rules. The specific new contribution is to study as-if optimization using estimates of illness probabilities in clinical choice...

We study whether savings nudges have the unintended consequence of additional borrowing in high-interest credit. We use data from a pre-registered experiment that encouraged 3.1 million bank customers to save via SMS messages and train a machine learning algorithm to predict individual-level...

This paper aims to identify the causal effects of smoking on mental health using data from the Lung Health Study, a randomized trial of smoking cessation treatment with five years of follow-up interviews. In the short-run, distress increases, likely reflecting the effects of nicotine withdrawal....

This paper provides evidence from the US and Denmark that managers with a business degree ("business managers") reduce their employees' wages. Within five years of the appointment of a business manager, wages decline by 6% and the labor share by 5 percentage points in the US, and by 3% and 3...

Smoking and obesity are the two leading causes of preventable deaths in the United States. Because smoking is subject to heavy government intervention, understanding the effect of smoking on obesity is important in determining the extent of unintended costs or benefits of such intervention. The...

Although non-experimental studies find robust neighborhood effects on adults, such findings have been challenged by results from the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) residential mobility experiment. Using a within-study comparison design, this paper compares experimental and non-experimental...

Why is invention strongly positively correlated with parental income not only in the US but also in Finland which displays low income inequality and high social mobility? Using data on 1.45M Finnish individuals and their parents, we find that: (i) the positive association between parental income...

This paper examines the effects of a comprehensive performance pay program for teachers implemented in high-need schools on students' longer-run educational, criminal justice, and economic self-sufficiency outcomes. Using linked administrative data from a Southern state, we leverage the...