We use data from a field experiment at Kiva, the online microfinance platform, to examine the role of transactions costs and social distance in decision-making. Requests for loans are either written in English or another language, and our treatment consists of posting requests in the latter...

The voluminous literature on minimum wages offers little consensus on the extent to which a wage floor impacts employment. We argue that the minimum wage will impact employment over time, through changes in growth rather than an immediate drop in relative employment levels. We conduct...

Gender disparities in academic performance may be driven in part by the interaction of teacher and student gender, but systematic sorting of students into classrooms makes it difficult to identify causal effects. We use the random assignment of students to Korean middle school classrooms and...

A major concern with addressing the negative externalities of gasoline consumption by regulating fuel economy, rather than increasing fuel taxes, is that households respond by driving more. This paper exploits a discrete threshold in the eligibility for Cash for Clunkers to show that fuel...

This paper explores the relationship between the minimum wage, the structure of employee compensation, and worker welfare. We advance a conceptual framework that describes the conditions under which a minimum wage increase will alter the provision of fringe benefits, alter employment outcomes,...

We exploit data from middle schools in Seoul, South Korea, where students and teachers are randomly assigned to classrooms, and find that female students taught by a female versus a male teacher score higher on standardized tests compared to male students even five years later. We also find that...

Most data sets indicate a positive correlation between having health insurance and utilizing health care services. Yet the direction of causality is not at all clear. If we ob-serve a positive correlation between the utilization of health care services and insurance status, we do not know if...

The casual links between health and economic resources have long concerned social scientists. We use four waves of data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to analyze the impact of wealth upon an individual's health status. The difficulty in approaching this task that has bedeviled previous...

A general finding in the empirical literature on charitable giving is that among older individuals, both the probability of giving and the conditional amount of donations decrease with age, ceteris paribus. In this paper, we use data on giving by alumni at an anonymous university to investigate...

The voluminous literature on minimum wages offers little consensus on the extent to which a wage floor impacts employment. We argue that the minimum wage will impact employment over time, through changes in growth rather than an immediate drop in relative employment levels. We conduct...