Economics

A foundational question in General Equilibrium theory—when is an equilibrium stable?—has remained largely unresolved for over 150 years despite important contributions. This paper proposes a resolution.

Since the 1974 Safe Drinking Water Act, the U.S. has spent $2 trillion to provide safe drinking water, yet drinking water for 10–20 percent of Americans violates standards. We study trends, causes, and consequences of U.S. drinking water pollution, using 266 million readings on 1,250 pollutants over decades that we obtained from 48 states via dozens of Freedom of Information Act and associated requests. We link pollution to administrative Medicare data on older Americans' health outcomes. Three findings emerge. First, U.S. drinking water pollution has declined rapidly; the share of readings exceeding current health standards fell by half from 2003–2019. Unregulated pollutants declined mo..

The five largest U.S. technology firms spent $380 billion on capital expenditure in 2025 and are forecast to spend roughly double that in 2026. These firms risk bankruptcy unless expected profits grow commensurately. We embed this observation in a two-sector open-economy model with rare productivity booms. We calibrate the boom size to match the observed increase in investment projected through 2027, implying that a boom raises AI-sector productivity by a factor of roughly 2.7. We then calibrate a two-year window of a 50% annual probability of an increase of the same magnitude, generating a range of scenarios consistent with the wide variety of industry forecasts, along with an elevated perm..

Scaling up effective policies often requires the attention of frontline bureaucrats with many competing responsibilities. Even when policymakers adopt effective programs, implementation may not follow. In a nationwide experiment in the Dominican Republic, we test interventions to increase school principals' implementation of an educational program proven effective in a previous RCT. Only 37% of control schools verifiably implemented the intervention when ordered to by the Ministry of Education, compared with 83% in the original trial. Implementation was no higher among schools that previously implemented the program in the RCT, suggesting that fixed costs of adoption do not explain non-adopt..

Baltimore's homicide rate fell by roughly 60% between 2022 and 2025, an exceptional decline among large U.S. cities. At the start of this period, Baltimore launched a strategy that concentrated police and social service resources on a small set of people thought to be driving group-involved gun violence. The approach—“focused deterrence”—has been implemented in some form by cities across the U.S. The strategy was introduced first in the Western police district, one of the highest-violence communities in the U.S. Relative to comparable Baltimore neighborhoods, we estimate that within 18 months shootings and homicides in the Western district fell by roughly one third and carjackings by..

This paper estimates the causal effect of height on adolescents’ body image, encompassing self-perceptions of weight, the accuracy of those perceptions, and weight-management aspirations. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97), we leverage within-individual variation in height during adolescence and condition on body mass index (BMI) to isolate the effects of height on body image outcomes. We find that taller adolescents are more likely to perceive themselves as overweight, even holding BMI constant, and are less likely to underestimate their weight category. However, the direction of misclassification diverges by gender: taller boys are more likely to corr..

This paper introduces Geographic PageRank (GPR), an innovative measure of place quality that is based on migration decisions, employing a recursive algorithm that leverages the full network of migration flows. Using various public data sources, we construct GPR rankings for U.S. counties and metropolitan areas. We also extend the rankings to capture changes over time and differences for population subgroups, providing a versatile data product. As an application, we show that GPR can serve as an "anti-instrument'' for unobserved housing quality when pricing environmental amenities, recovering a correctly signed implicit price of air pollution that is in line with quasi-experimental benchmarks..

A small group of people accounts for a large majority of flows between labor market states and of spells in un- and non-employment. In this paper, we ask whether it is possible to identify those weakly attached to the labor market during their prime working-age years using information available early in their lives. First, we use information on labor force transitions between ages 30 and 50 contained in the long panel provided by the NLSY79 to identify those weakly connected to the labor market during their prime age. To do so, we use k-means clustering on moments describing observed spells in employment, unemployment, and non-employment between 30 and 50. This points to a group of less atta..

GLP-1 therapies for obesity promise substantial health improvements, but little is known about how their benefits vary across socioeconomic and demographic groups. Using a nationally representative microsimulation model of US adults and Shapely-value decomposition, we estimate the lifetime health and economic benefits of GLP-1 treatment and examine how those gains vary across individuals. The largest differences emerge across education. Individuals with less than a high school education experience experience roughly 14% higher gains in lifetime net social value, 16-17% larger improvements in discounted generalized risk- and severity-adjusted life-years (GRASA-QALYs), and 20% greater increase..

Quantitative easing (QE) has been criticized for helping fuel the post-COVID inflation boom and causing large central bank losses. In this paper, we argue that QE should be evaluated mainly on its ability to achieve core macro-objectives as well for its effects on the consolidated fiscal position of the government and central bank, although central bank losses can matter to the extent that they may weaken central bank credibility. Using a DSGE model with segmented asset markets, we show how QE can provide a sizeable boost to output and inflation in a deep liquidity trap and can reduce public debt substantially. This contrasts to the rise in public debt that occurs under fiscal expansion and ..