The objective of this paper is to describe and understand the determinants of changes in the number and quality of new legal immigrants to the United States over the last 25 years. Our main interest is in understanding the behavioral response of potential immigrants to changes in the U.S....

We study the prevalence and traits of global collaborative patents for U.S. public companies, where the inventor team is located both within and outside of the United States. Collaborative patents are frequently observed when a corporation is entering into a new foreign region for innovative...

The immense literature on discrimination treats outcomes as relative: One group suffers compared to another. But does a difference arise because agents discriminate against others--are exophobic--or because they favor their own kind--are endophilic? This difference matters, as the relative...

Do changes in government spending affect voluntary contributions to those recipients? We examine how changes in K-12 education budgets impact donations to teachers using data from DonorsChoose.org, an online crowdfunding platform for public school teachers to raise money for their classrooms....

In this paper we use an instrumental variable estimator to exploit sources of independent variation, which allows unbiased estimation of the tax-price elasticity under more general conditions. The estimator is applied to the demand for charitable giving. A charitable giving equation is an...

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...

Politicians and regulators rely on feedback from the public when setting policies. For-profit corporations and non-pro t entities are active in this process and are arguably expected to provide independent viewpoints. Policymakers (and the public at large), however, may be unaware of the...

Do new societal needs increase charitable giving or simply reallocate a fixed supply of donations? We study this question using IRS datasets and the natural experiment of deadly tornadoes. Among ZIP Codes located more than 20 miles away from a tornado's path, donations by households increase by...

We review an empirical literature that studies the role of social interactions in driving economic and financial decision making. We first summarize recent work that documents an important role of social interactions in explaining household decisions in housing and mortgage markets. This...