This paper estimates causal intergenerational occupation transmission in the military using discontinuities in parents' eligibility for service from the Armed Forces Qualification Test. A parent's enlistment in the Army increases their children's military service propensity by between 58% and...

I discuss recent books offering differing explanations for persistent U.S. poverty. Desmond (2023) argues that aid to low-income Americans is captured by more powerful market actors. I contextualize this concern as about incidence and consider both policies for changing incidence (by changing...

SHARE, the "Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe", is a large population-based panel survey among people aged 50 and over with data from 28 European countries and Israel. It investigates individual, economic, health-related, and social life-course circumstances in order to shed...

Bank payout policy is strongly affected by regulation and politics, especially for the largest banks. Banks, but not industrial firms, have consistently lower payouts in times of high regulation uncertainty and under democratic presidents. After the Global Financial Crisis, bank regulators'...

We present results from a randomized controlled trial in Bangladesh that introduced operational practices to improve energy efficiency and reduce emissions in 276 "zigzag" brick kilns. 65% of intervention kilns adopted the improved practices. Treatment assignment reduced energy use by 10.3%...

International transactions are costly because they require investments in logistics, contracts, and the acquisition of local institutional knowledge. We posit that a portion of the fixed costs of entering a specific export market can be used toward costs of acquiring imports from that same...

We examine the rise of cloud computing and AI in China and their impacts on industry dynamics after the shock to the cost of Internet-based computing power and services. We find that cloud computing is associated with an increase in firm entry, exit and the likelihood of M&A in industries that...

We examine technology adoption and consumer welfare disparities across demographic groups using data from an online solar photovoltaic (PV) marketplace. Low-income households are 25% less likely to purchase solar through the platform and obtain 53% lower expected consumer surplus than...

Globally, coercive labor (i.e., forced, bonded, and/or trafficked labor) and child labor are disproportionately prevalent in environments with weak regulatory enforcement and state capacity. Effective strategies for addressing them may therefore need to align with the private incentives of...

Operation Warp Speed (OWS) was a U.S. government-led program to accelerate the development, production, and administration of COVID-19 vaccines. The program cut the typical ten-year timeline needed to develop a new vaccine down to ten months and began vaccinating vulnerable populations within a...