Economics

Health care costs in the U.S. have grown dramatically over the past several decades, with one possible cause being physicians providing unnecessary services out of fear of being sued for malpractice – a phenomenon known as “defensive medicine”. States responded by enacting different types of tort reforms. This paper reviews the literature on the effects of these tort reforms on outcomes related to malpractice risk, quantity and quality of health care services, overall utilization and expenditures, physician supply, and patient affordability. We use Google Scholar to identify papers that fall into this scope and use either associational or quasi-experimental quantitative methods. The pr..

Can citizen-led protests lead to meaningful economic redistribution and nudge governments to increase redistributive fiscal transfers? We study the effects of protests on fiscal redistribution using evidence from Nigeria. We digitized twenty-six years of public finance data from 1988 to 2016 to examine the effects of protests on intergovernmental transfers. We find that protests increase transfers to protesting regions, but only in areas that are politically aligned with disbursing governments. Evidence from the large-scale 2012 Occupy Nigeria protests confirms these results. Protesters also face increased police violence, particularly in non-aligned regions. The results show that protests c..

Colombian coca cultivation fell dramatically between 2000 and 2015, a period that saw intense U.S.-backed eradication and interdiction efforts. That progress reversed in 2015, when peace talks and legal rulings in Colombia opened enforcement gaps. Coca plantation has since increased to record levels, which coincided with a sharp rise in cocaine-related overdose deaths in the U.S. We estimate how much of that rise can be causally attributed to Colombia’s new coca boom. Leveraging the unforeseen coca supply shock and cross-county differences in pre-shock cocaine exposure, we find that the surge in supply caused an immediate rise in overdose mortality in the U.S. Our analysis estimates on the..

This study provides evidence that geopolitical considerations systematically shape funding evaluations of international collaboration proposals. We examine this dynamic in the consequential context of U.S.–China collaboration. Across two large-scale randomized experiments with U.S. policymakers and U.S.-based scientists, we find substantial and consistent penalties for proposals involving China-based collaborators. Policymakers express much greater unconditional support for proposals with Germany-based collaborators than for otherwise identical proposals with China-based collaborators (68% vs. 28%). Crucially, this penalty is not confined to policymakers: scientists themselves exhibit a si..

This paper quantifies the effects of large-scale deportations on wages, prices, and real incomes in the United States. We impute the legal status for each worker in the American Community Survey by combining detailed individual information with group-level visa records. In 2024, 3.2% of US workers were unauthorized, but some regions and sectors were heavily dependent on unauthorized immigrant labor. We develop a dynamic quantitative framework with multiple regions, sectors and occupations, heterogeneous workers, and endogenous capital accumulation to study the economic impacts of removing unauthorized workers. We derive analytical expressions relating region- and occupation-specific real wag..

We measure the impact of increased immigration on mortality among elderly Americans, who rely on the immigrant-intensive health and long-term care sectors. Using a shift-share approach we find a strong impact of immigration on the size of the immigrant care workforce: admitting 1,000 new immigrants would lead to 142 new foreign healthcare workers, without evidence of crowd out of native health care workers. We also find striking effects on mortality: a 25% increase in the steady state flow of immigrants to the US would result in 5,000 fewer deaths nationwide. We identify reduced use of nursing homes as a key mechanism driving this result.

This paper uses microdata on U.S. mutual fund and ETF portfolios from SEC Form NPORT to study American investment in Chinese Renminbi (RMB)–denominated bonds. We show that, even as total foreign holdings of Chinese bonds rebounded in 2024, U.S. holdings of RMB bonds fell sharply and that most of this decline reflects funds exiting RMB positions entirely. These patterns point to a shift in the composition of China’s foreign investor base away from U.S. institutional investors and illustrate how publicly available microdata can inform work on international currency use.

The H-1B program lets firms hire high-skill foreign workers for a six-year term. The annual number of visas allocated to for-profit firms is capped at 85,000 and there is excess demand for those visas. The analysis merges data from the Labor Condition Application where firms attest that H-1B hires do not adversely impact natives, the I-129 Petition for a Nonimmigrant Worker where firms request to hire a specific person, and the American Community Surveys. On average, H-1B workers earn 16 percent less than comparable natives. The payroll savings suggest that firms may be willing to pay a one-time fee to obtain an H-1B visa. The data are examined using a labor demand model to simulate how a fe..

Deportation is often framed as a necessary tool to protect public safety by removing people who commit crimes. We use newly available, and externally validated, administrative data containing all US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests from September 2015-October 2025. Beyond demonstrating national trends in immigration arrests by method and composition over time, we are also able to compare, for the first time, apprehensions spanning the start of the two Trump administrations, both of which focused on mass immigration enforcement. Our results reveal that the reality of immigration enforcement diverges sharply from the public narrative: while arrests spiked at the outset of both..

We establish three facts about work from home (WFH) in the United States. First, employees WFH more often at younger firms – almost twice as often at firms founded after 2015 than at firms founded before 1990. Second, employees working under younger CEOs have higher levels of WFH. The average WFH rate is 1.4 days per week when the CEO is under 30, compared to 1.1 days when the CEO is 60 or older. Third, the self-employed WFH more than twice as often as wage-and-salary employees. These facts highlight the importance of organizational and managerial attributes for the prevalence of WFH.

Network connections, both across and within markets, are central in countless economic contexts. In recent decades, a large literature has developed and applied flexible methods for measuring network connectedness and its evolution, based on variance decompositions from vector autoregressions (VARs), as in Diebold and Yilmaz (2014). Those VARs are, however, typically identified using full orthogonalization (Sims, 1980), or no orthogonalization (Koop, Pesaran, and Potter, 1996; Pesaran and Shin, 1998), which, although useful, are special and extreme cases of a more general framework that we develop in this paper. In particular, we allow network nodes to be connected in "clusters", such as ass..