We empirically model performance in the final round of a multiple-round tournament as a spatially autoregressive process, allowing us to sign and quantify the endogenous interactions between competitors. Doing so speaks to significant regularities in the data that suggest that a player's own...

We empirically model performance in the final round of a multiple-round tournament as a spatially autoregressive process, allowing us to sign and quantify the endogenous interactions between competitors. Doing so speaks to significant regularities in the data that suggest that a player's own...

We consider the voting behavior of Supreme Court Justices, finding evidence of co-dependencies in their votes. Coincident with changes in the party imbalance of the Court over time, sharp discontinuities in these dependencies are evident. Overall, the patterns suggest a tradeoff between...

We document the immediate and long-term effects of violent media. Specifically, we evaluate the effects of The Ultimate Fighter, a hit TV show that features fighters competing in violent mixed martial arts and which brought Ultimate Fighting Championship into the mainstream. We estimate the...

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...

Grade-based performance measures are often relied on when considering the efficacy of education-related policy interventions. Yet, it is common for measures of student performance to be subjected to curves and discretized through letter-grade transformations. We show how transformed grades...