Economists sometimes argue that a government cannot simultaneously have open borders and strong welfare programs. Yet within America, local school districts often adopt policies that entail significant resource transfers to parents, in spite of ostensibly open school-district borders. One recent...

Efficient natural gas recovery requires the development of an extensive pipeline network of gathering lines, connecting individual gas wells with processing stations and major transmission lines. Networks of gathering lines are likely to face the economic problem of double marginalization,...

Traditional economic theory suggests that the benefits of place-based public investments, such as environmental cleanups and public-school improvements, accrue largely to nearby property owners. Yet many disadvantaged households near these investments are renters. This raises concerns that these...

Student’s educational investment decisions are influenced by their beliefs about the returns to study effort and their chances of academic success. This highlights the importance of studying the effects of school policies on students’ beliefs about their ability to learn and achieve. To this...

Do grade configurations affect student academic performance? To bring new evidence to this question, I use recent district-by-grade data for nearly the entire United States which contain measures of test score achievement and rates of school switching induced by grade configuration. Past...

We consider the question of whether home language concentration among English learners, i.e. segregating English learners by home languages across schools, helps or hinders the acquisition of English. The sign of this effect is theoretically unclear, since there are at least two competing...

Previous research in the US has found negative health effects of contamination when it triggers regulatory violations. An important question is whether levels of contamination that do not trigger a health-based violation impact health. We study the impact of drinking water contamination in...