This paper studies the impact of compulsory schooling on in-school violence using individual-level administrative data matching education and criminal records from Queensland. Exploiting a dropout age reform in 2006, it defines a series of regression-discontinuity specifications. While police...

Does U.S. military aid make the United States safer? To answer this question, we collect data on 173 countries between 1968 and 2014. Exploiting quasi-random variation in the global patterns of U.S. military aid, our paper is the first to provide causal estimates of the effect of U.S. military...

We investigate the effect of U.S. military aid and U.S. troop deployments on anti-American terrorism, using a sample of 106 countries between 1986 and 2011. We find that greater military commitment leads to more anti-American terrorism. We study the underlying mechanisms using a mediation...

This chapter discusses the role of military interventionism and aid in nation-building. We argue that (1) intervention strategies of foreign actors like the United States often unfavorably interact with local institutional settings, which (2) produces undesired outcomes not only for the target...

There is limited existing evidence justifying the economic case for state education policy. Using newly-developed measures of the human capital of each state that allow for internal migration and foreign immigration, we estimate growth regressions that incorporate worker skills. We find that...

We show that, when school quality is measured by the educational standard and attaining the standard requires costly effort, secondary education needs not be a hierarchy with private schools offering better quality than public schools, as in Epple and Romano, 1998. An alternative configuration,...

Almost all countries worldwide closed schools at the outbreak of the Covid-19 crisis. I document that schooling time dropped on average by -55% in the US and -45% in Germany from the onset of the crisis to the summer of 2021. In the US, schools were closed longer in richer than in poorer areas,...

We demonstrate how mothers, fathers, and 15-17-year-old students alter their schedules around the K-12 academic year. Using regression discontinuity (RDD) methods, combined with dates on school year start and end dates by locality, we document several notable results. First, mothers are...

This paper identifies which investments in school facilities help students and are valued by homeowners. Using novel data on school district bonds, test scores, and house prices for 29 U.S. states and a research design that exploits close elections with staggered timing, we show that increased...

The diffusion of social media coincided with a worsening of mental health conditions among adolescents and young adults in the United States, giving rise to speculation that social media might be detrimental to mental health. In this paper, we provide quasi-experimental estimates of the impact...