Many U.S.-born descendants of Mexican immigrants do not identify as Mexican or Hispanic in response to the Hispanic origin question asked in the Census and other government surveys. Analyzing microdata from the 2000 U.S. Census and the 2001-2019 American Community Surveys, we show that the age...

Cities are often described as engines of economic growth. We assess this statement quantitatively. We focus on two mechanisms: a static agglomeration effect that makes production in bigger cities more efficient, and a dynamic effect whereby urban scale impacts the productivity of invention,...

We study how government policies and corporate commitments to decarbonize interact under two externalities: environmental damages and green innovation spillovers. Unconstrained carbon taxes and innovation subsidies could achieve first-best outcomes, but when government policies face constraints,...

Early childhood in developing countries faces a greater prevalence of risk factors and limited resources, underscoring the need for effective, scalable support models. We develop and experimentally evaluate a multi-component approach to enhance family well-being over-the-phone. The program...

Protecting species' habitats is the main policy tool employed across the globe to reduce biodiversity losses. These protections are hypothesized to conflict with private landowners' interests. We study the economic consequences of the most extensive and controversial piece of such environmental...

Children with a disability are 3.5 times more likely to be maltreated. Federal Early Intervention (EI) serves 426,000 children 0-3 with a disability, 3.7% of the entire population under three. EI's objective is to support families in caring for their children's special needs. Compared to...

How can we use the novel capacities of large language models (LLMs) in empirical research? And how can we do so while accounting for their limitations, which are themselves only poorly understood? We develop an econometric framework to answer this question that distinguishes between two types of...

Platform intermediation of goods and services has considerably transformed the U.S. economy. We use administrative data on U.S. tax returns to study the role of the gig economy on entrepreneurship. We find that gig workers are more likely to become entrepreneurs, particularly those who are lower...

A common practice in evidence-based decision-making uses estimates of conditional probabilities P(y|x) obtained from research studies to predict outcomes y on the basis of observed covariates x. Given this information, decisions are then based on the predicted outcomes. Researchers commonly...

We propose a novel time-series econometric framework to forecast U.S. Presidential election outcomes in real time by combining polling data, economic fundamentals, and political prediction market prices. Our model estimates the joint dynamics of voter preferences across states. Applying our...