We introduce the concept of racial capital, defined as the collective material and non- material assets of the racial groups to which a child is exposed while growing up, and examine its potential to explain racial disparities in life outcomes that persist even after accounting for a broad range...

Critics of privatization argue that poor labor force restructuring is a key concern and that governments should establish better retrenchment programs. Using new data from arandom sample of 400 companies in the world, we test competing theories about the wisdom of retrenchment programs and their...

We study the implications of police discretion for public safety. Highway patrol officers exercise discretion over fines by deviating from statutory fine rules. Relying on variation across officers in this discretionary behavior, we find that harsher sanctions reduce future traffic offending and...

I examine teacher preferences using a discrete-choice experiment, which I link to administrative data on teacher effectiveness. I estimate willingness-to-pay for a rich set of compensation elements and working conditions. Highly effective teachers usually have the same preferences as their...

In recent decades, many states have reduced future retirement benefits for newly hired teachers. We estimate that in 2020 the average initial monthly retirement benefit, for teachers retiring with 30 years of service, is 11.2 percent lower than that of teachers retiring in the same plan with the...

When an employee expects repeated evaluation and performance incentives over time, the potential future rewards create an incentive to invest in building relevant skills. Because new skills benefit job performance, the effects of an evaluation program can persist after the rewards end or even...

Information provision, choice simplification, social messaging, active-choice frameworks, and automatic enrollment all increase retirement savings. However, gauging the relative efficacy of these approaches is challenging because the supporting evidence spans widely different institutional...

We conducted a randomized controlled trial involving nearly 700 customer-service representatives (CSRs) in a Canadian government service agency to study whether providing CSRs with performance feedback with or without peer comparison affected their subsequent organ donor registration rates....

We study how public sector workers balance their professional motivations with private economic concerns, focusing on police arrests. Arrests made near the end of an officer's shift typically require overtime work, and officers respond by reducing arrest frequency but increasing arrest quality....