Competitive exams are a standard method for selecting civil servants. Yet, evidence on the effectiveness of such approach is mixed, and lack of personnel data limits our understanding of the mechanisms underlying this varying success. We digitize personnel and financial data to study the impacts...

This paper takes advantage of a unique policy change to examine how principals make decisions regarding teacher dismissal. In 2004, the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) and Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) signed a new collective bargaining agreement that gave principals the flexibility to dismiss...

We attempt to make inferences about the elasticity of the government's demand for specific weapons by analyzing the statistical relationship between quantity and cost revisions across the population of major weapon systems, using data contained in the Pentagon's Selected Acquisition Reports. The...