The costs of low-carbon energy fell dramatically over the past decade, leading to rapid growth in its deployment. However, many challenges remain to deploy low-carbon energy at a scale necessary to meet net zero carbon emission targets. We argue that developing complementary technologies and...

Asymmetric information can distort market outcomes. I study how the online disclosure of information affects consumers' behavior and firms' incentives to upgrade product quality in markets where information is traditionally limited. I first build a model of consumer search with firms' endogenous...

The large cities in the US are the most expensive places to live. Paradoxically, this cost is disproportionately paid by workers who could work remotely, and live anywhere. The greater potential for remote work in large cities is mostly accounted for by their specialization in skill- and...

Since 1980, economic growth in the U.S. has been fastest in its largest cities. We show that a group of skill- and information-intensive service industries are responsible for all of this new urban bias in recent growth. We then propose a simple explanation centered around the interaction of...

How do alternative job opportunities affect teacher quality? We provide the first causal evidence on this question by exploiting business cycle conditions at career start as a source of exogenous variation in the outside options of potential teachers. Unlike prior research, we directly assess...

Differences in teacher quality are commonly cited as a key determinant of the huge international student performance gaps. However, convincing evidence on this relationship is still lacking, in part because it is unclear how to measure teacher quality consistently across countries. We use unique...

The paper characterizes the optimal tax policy and the optimal quality of day care services in a OLG model with warm-glow altruism where parental choices over child care arrangements affect the probability that the child becomes a high-skilled adult in a type-specific way. With respect to...

Scores in standardized international student achievement tests and some recent adult literacy studies provide interesting data on the quality of educational outputs and on the skill level of the population that can be a useful complement to the data on the quantity of schooling which have been...

This paper views teacher quality through the human capital perspective. Teacher quality exhibits substantial growth over teachers’ careers, but why it improves is not well understood. I use a human capital production function nesting On-the-Job-Training (OJT) and Learning-by-Doing (LBD) and...

What happens when employers would like to screen their employees but only observe a subset of output? We specify a model in which heterogeneous employees respond by producing more of the observed output at the expense of the unobserved output. Though this substitution distorts output in the...