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....

Institutional investors are less likely to support shareholder proposals involving environmental and social issues for firms headquartered in Republican-led states. The lower support concentrates in recent years, when politicians became more vocal about firms' social responsibility activities,...

This paper examines the effect of U.S. food aid on conflict in recipient countries. To establish a causal relationship, we exploit time variation in food aid caused by fluctuations in U.S. wheat production together with cross-sectional variation in a country's tendency to receive any food aid...

We estimate spillovers from public funding for health research in the context of the NIH's Fogarty International Center's AIDS International Training and Research Program, which aims to strengthen scientific capacity in AIDS endemic countries by providing African researchers with training...

Against a background of projections of sharply increasing elderly dependency rates, workers in the major industrial economies are apprehensive that their social security benefit entitlements will be cut before or after they retire, leaving them with inadequate retirement income. This paper looks...

This paper presents a framework for how to incorporate prior sources of information into the design of a sequential experiment. These sources can include previous experiments, expert opinions, or the experimenter's own introspection. We formalize this problem using a multi-prior Bayesian...

Many governments have engaged in policy experimentation in various forms to resolve uncertainty and facilitate learning. However, little is understood about the characteristics of policy experimentation, and how the structure of experimentation may affect policy learning and policy outcomes. We...