The COVID-19 pandemic caused significant disruption in schooling in the U.S., and student test scores showed dramatic declines by the end of the 2020-21 school year. We use state test score data to analyze patterns of test score recovery over the 2021-22 school year. On average, we find that 20%...

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming production across all sectors of the economy, with the potential to both complement and substitute for traditional labor inputs. Healthcare is no exception. Dozens of recent academic studies demonstrate that AI can contribute to the healthcare value...

Burnout of physicians and other medical personnel is a major problem in the economics of healthcare systems, potentially costing billions of dollars. Knowledge of the determinants and costs of burnout at the organization level is sparse, making it difficult to assess the net benefits of...

Clinical trials following the "gold standard" of random assignment frequently use independent lotteries to allocate patients to treatment and control arms. However, independent assignment can generate treatment and control arms that are unbalanced (i.e. treatment and control populations with...

This study explores the effect of in-person schooling on youth suicide. We document three key findings. First, using data from the National Vital Statistics System from 1990-2019, we document the historical association between teen suicides and the school calendar. We show that suicides among...

Are laboratory safety practices a tax on scientific productivity? We examine this question by exploiting the substantial increase in safety regulations at the University of California following the shocking death of a research assistant in 2008. Difference-in-differences analyses show that...

The suicide rate in the United States has risen nearly 40 percent since 2000. This increase is puzzling because suicide rates had been falling for decades at the end of the 20th Century. In this paper, we review important facts about the changing rate of suicide. General trends miss the story of...

We examine innovative contexts like scientific research or technical R&D where agents must search across many potential projects of varying and uncertain returns. Is it better to possess incomplete but accurate data on the value of some projects, or might there be cases where it is better to...

Starting from Robbins (1952), the literature on experimentation via multi-armed bandits has wed exploration and exploitation. Nonetheless, in many applications, agents' exploration and exploitation need not be intertwined: a policymaker may assess new policies different than the status quo; an...