While comparing students across large differences in GPA follows one's intuition that higher GPAs correlate positively with higher-performing students, this need not be the case locally. Grade-point averaging is fundamentally a combinatorics problem, and thereby challenges inference based on...

While comparing students across large differences in GPA follows one's intuition that higher GPAs correlate positively with higher-performing students, this need not be the case locally. Grade-point averaging is fundamentally a combinatorics problem, and thereby challenges inference based on...

Simple OLS estimates of the effect of school-imposed penalties for drug use on a student's consumption of marijuana are biased if both are determined by unobservable school or individual attributes. The potential reverse causality is also a challenge to retrieving estimates of the causal...

I consider the alcohol consumption of opposite-gender peers as explanatory to adolescent sexual intercourse and demonstrate that female sexual activity is higher where there is higher alcohol consumption among male peers. This relationship is robust to school fixed effects, cannot be explained...

We consider the effect of legal access to alcohol, which is known to increase drinking behavior, on academic performance. We first estimate the effect using an RD design but argue that this approach is not well-suited to the research question in our setting. Our preferred approach instead...

We analyze the effects of a school-based incentive program on children’s exercise habits. The program offers children an opportunity to win prizes if they walk or bike to school during prize periods. We use daily child-level data and individual fixed effects models to measure the impact of the...