Governments increasingly use RCTs to test innovations before scale up. Yet, we know little about whether and how they incorporate the results of the experiments into policy-making. We follow up with 67 U.S. city departments which collectively ran 73 RCTs in collaboration with a national Nudge...

The FDA is responsible for the approval of new drugs, biological products and medical devices in the United States. As part of the approval process, the FDA relies on advisory committees, which provide independent advice from outside experts. We combine a structural approach with newly collected...

We provide evidence that individuals substitute between political contributions and charitable contributions, using micro data from the American Red Cross and Federal Election Commission. First, we find that foreign natural disasters, which are positive shocks to charitable giving, crowd out...

Economists have studied the impact of numerous state laws, from welfare rules to voting ID requirements. Yet for all this policy evaluation, what do we know about policy diffusion--how these policies spread from state to state? We present a series of facts based on a data set of over 700 U.S....

In 2006, the federal government effectively uncapped student borrowing for graduate programs with the introduction of the Graduate PLUS loan program. Access to additional federal loans increased graduate students' borrowing and shifted the composition of their loans from private to federal debt....

Consumer choices are increasingly mediated by algorithms, which use data on those past choices to infer consumer preferences and then curate future choice sets. Behavioral economics suggests one reason these algorithms so often fail: choices can systematically deviate from preferences. For...

Theoretical advances in macroeconomics made in the last three decades have had a major influence on macroeconomic policy analysis. Moreover, over the last several decades, the United States and other countries have undertaken a variety of policy changes that are precisely what macroeconomic...

In this paper I analyze the role of foreign advisors in stabilization programs. I discuss from an analytical perspective why foreigners may help a developing country's government put in place a successful stabilization program. This framework is used to analyze Chile's experience with...

The Employment Act of 1946 created the Council of Economic Advisers as an institution and serves as a convenient marker of a broader change in opinions: the assumption by the federal government of the role of stability the macro- economy. The magnitude of this shift should not be understated:...