The debate about behavioral economics – the incorporation of insights from psychology into economics – is often framed as a question about the foundational assumptions of economic models. This paper presents a more pragmatic perspective on behavioral economics that focuses on its value for...

We use administrative records on the incomes of more than 40 million children and their parents to describe three features of intergenerational mobility in the United States. First, we characterize the joint distribution of parent and child income at the national level. The conditional...

In Project STAR, 11,571 students in Tennessee and their teachers were randomly assigned to classrooms within their schools from kindergarten to third grade. This article evaluates the long-term impacts of STAR by linking the experimental data to administrative records. We first demonstrate that...

We show that the effects of taxes on labor supply are shaped by interactions between adjustment costs for workers and hours constraints set by firms. We develop a model in which firms post job offers characterized by an hours requirement and workers pay search costs to find jobs. We present...

Do retirement savings policies--such as tax subsidies or employer-provided pension plans--increase total saving for retirement or simply induce shifting across accounts? We revisit this classic question using 45 million observations on wealth for the population of Denmark. We find that a...

This paper studies the effect of interest rates on investment in an environment where firms make irreversible investments with uncertain pay-offs. In this setting, changes in the interest rate affect both the cost of capital and the cost of delaying investment to acquire information. These two...

Macroeconomic calibrations imply much larger labor supply elasticities than microeconometric studies. One prominent explanation for this divergence is that indivisible labor generates extensive margin responses that are not captured in micro studies of hours choices. We evaluate whether existing...

We evaluate policies to increase prosocial behavior using a field experiment with 1,500 referees at the Journal of Public Economics. We randomly assign referees to four groups: a control group with a six week deadline to submit a referee report, a group with a four week deadline, a cash...

Are teachersʼ impacts on studentsʼ test scores ("value-added") a good measure of their quality? One reason this question has sparked debate is disagreement about whether value-added (VA) measures provide unbiased estimates of teachersʼ causal impacts on student achievement. We test for bias...