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, which collectively enroll 10 percent of American public university students, to systematically...

We derive closed-form solutions and sufficient statistics for inflation and GDP dynamics in multi-sector New Keynesian economies with arbitrary input-output linkages. Analytically, we decompose how production linkages (1) amplify the persistence of inflation and GDP responses to monetary and...

We analyze a coordination game with information-constrained players. The players' actions are based on a noisy compressed representation of the game's payoffs in a particular case, where the compressed representation is a latent state learned by a variational autoencoder (VAE). Our generalized...

We study a unique grading policy at a large US public university allowing students to mask their letter grades into a "Pass", after having observed their original grade. Using administrative transcript records, we find that female students are substantially less likely to mask their grades than...

In recent decades, Chinese researchers have become preeminent contributors to the scientific enterprise, as reflected by the number of publications originating from Chinese research institutions. China's rise in science has the potential to push forward the global frontier, but mere production...

In Fall 2014, Wellesley College began mandating pass/fail grading for courses taken by first-year, first-semester students, although instructors continued to record letter grades. We identify the causal effect of the policy on course choice and performance, using a...

While the direct impacts of minimum wage changes on employment have received considerable attention, these policy changes have the potential to impact skill attainment by changing the opportunity cost of college enrollment. Using institutional data on college enrollment and program completion,...

How do college students and postsecondary institutions react to changes in skill demand in the U.S. labor market? We quantify the magnitude and nature of response in the 4-year sector using a new measure of labor demand at the institution-major level that combines online job ads with geographic...

Is the labor market for US researchers experiencing the best or worst of times? This paper analyzes the market for recently minted Ph.D. recipients using supply-and-demand logic and data linking graduate students to their dissertations and W2 tax records. We also construct a new...

Poor post-secondary education infrastructure and opportunities partly explain the low higher education rates in developing countries. This paper estimates the effect of a program that improved post-secondary education infrastructure by building many university campuses across Uruguay. Leveraging...