We collect data on the movement and productivity of elite scientists. Their mobility is remarkable: nearly half of the world's most-cited physicists work outside their country of birth. We show they migrate systematically towards nations with large Ramp;D spending. Our study cannot adjudicate on...

Modern technology empowers human beings to cope with various extreme weather events. Using Chinese historical data, we examine the impact of extreme weather on long-term human health in an environment where individuals have no access to modern technology. By combining life course data on 5,000...

The lawsuit Students For Fair Admissions v. Harvard University provided an unprecedented look at how an elite school makes admissions decisions. Using publicly released reports, we examine the preferences Harvard gives for recruited athletes, legacies, those on the dean's interest list, and...

A commonly held perception is that an elite graduate degree can "scrub" a less prestigious but less costly undergraduate degree. Using data from the National Survey of College Graduates from 2003 through 2017, this paper examines the relationship between the status of undergraduate degrees and...

This paper evaluates the impact of the Purchase 4 Progress (P4P) intervention implemented by World Food Program in Ethiopia on per capita income as well as across sub-social groups. The intervention is intended to improve the market power of smallholder farmers through cooperatives that has the...

We explore recent policy changes which aim to equalize access to elite elementary schools in Beijing, to identify the effect of access to quality education on house prices based on a unique dataset. Using property transaction records from Beijing over the period 2013-2016, we construct a...

In Australia, the so-called Group of Eight (Go8) universities have lower student-to-staff ratios, better qualified staff, superior research outcomes, and generally better placement in university rankings compared to non-Go8 universities. They are also typically the most competitive universities...

State merit aid programs have been found to reduce the likelihood that students attend college out-of-state. Using the U.S. News & World Report rankings of colleges and universities to measure college quality and Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System data to measure enrollment, we...

This paper estimates the impact of elite school attendance on long-run outcomes including completed education, income and fertility. Our data consists of individuals born in the 1950s and educated in a UK district that assigned students to either elite or non-elite secondary schools. Using...

I take advantage of a sharp discontinuity in the probability of admission to an elite university at the admission score threshold, to estimate causal returns to college education quality. I use a newly constructed dataset, which combines individual administrative records about high school,...