Knowledge that Transforms

How do majority groups respond to narrowing inequality in racially polarized environments? We study this by examining the Freedmen's Bureau, an agency created after the US Civil War to aid former slaves and launch institutional reform in the South. Using new historical records and an event-study approach, we estimate the bureau's impact on political, social, and economic outcomes. Vote shares for Democrats, the party that previously championed slavery and opposed Black civil rights, initially eroded in bureau counties, but these impacts faded as federal oversight weakened. Racial backlash emerged rapidly and persisted, suggesting White majorities sought to offset Black progress.

This paper considers how far private adaptation may reduce future vulnerability to climate risks. Using data on monthly firm-to-firm transactions from Pakistan, we find that flood-affected firms are more likely to relocate to safer ground and shift purchases toward suppliers in less flood-prone regions and reached via less flood-prone roads. The results indicate that firms are imperfectly informed about flood risk and update their beliefs following floods. We quantify aggregate impacts using a spatial model of endogenous production network formation. The findings suggest that firms' learning will shape the economic impact of increasingly frequent climate-related disasters.

This paper studies how collective bargaining affects wages and amenities. By merging collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) to linked employer-employee data in Brazil, I combine rich contracted amenities with wage information. I implement a difference-in-differences strategy that exploits a court ruling enforcing CBA continuation (i.e., ultra-activity) to estimate the effects of union bargaining power. Strengthening unions raises wages and amenities without reducing employment—increasing retention despite some labor-labor substitution. A revealed-preference approach shows that amenities account for 45 percent of total compensation gains. These findings suggest that collective bargaining can offset monopsony power, but employers retain the right-to-manage workforce composition.

Durables represent a large share of households' marginal propensity to spend (MPX). We develop a quantitative model of spending that takes durables into account and matches a rich set of empirical regularities simultaneously. Scaling the response of nondurables provides a poor approximation of the MPX on durables when it comes to its distribution in the population, its persistence over time, and its cyclicality. As an application, we study how the MPX varies with the size of stimulus checks and find that it declines more slowly compared to a model of purely nondurable spending.

We study residential segregation and access to public services across 1.5 million urban and rural neighborhoods in India. Muslim and Scheduled Caste segregation in India is high by global standards and only slightly lower than Black-White segregation in the United States. Within cities, public facilities and infrastructure are systematically less available in Muslim and Scheduled Caste neighborhoods. Nearly all regressive allocation is across neighborhoods within cities—at the most informal and least studied form of government. These inequalities are not visible in the aggregate data typically used for research and policy.

Based on a narrative classification of all significant postwar changes in R&D appropriations for five major federal agencies, we find that an increase in nondefense R&D appropriations leads to increases in various measures of innovative activity and higher business-sector productivity in the long run. We structurally estimate the production function elasticity of nondefense government R&D capital using the SP-IV methodology of Lewis and Mertens (2024) and obtain implied returns of 140 to 210 percent over the postwar period. The estimates indicate that government-funded R&D accounts for one-fifth of business-sector TFP growth since WWII and imply substantial underfunding of nondefense R&D.

Statistical inference is often simplified by sample splitting. This simplification comes at the cost of the introduction of randomness not native to the data. We propose a simple procedure for sequentially aggregating statistics constructed with multiple splits of the same sample. The user specifies a bound and a nominal error rate. If the procedure is implemented twice on the same data, the nominal error rate approximates the chance that the results differ by more than the bound. We illustrate the application of the procedure to several widely applied econometric methods.

This paper studies the economic impacts of carbon pricing. Exploiting institutional features of the European carbon market and high-frequency data, I identify carbon policy shocks and trace their dynamic effects. A restrictive carbon policy shock raises energy prices, reduces emissions, spurs green innovation, but decreases economic activity—disproportionately burdening poorer households. Not only are the poor more affected because of their higher energy spending, but they also experience larger income losses. These indirect, general equilibrium effects via income and employment play an important role in the transmission of carbon pricing policies, accounting for about two-thirds of the aggregate consumption response.

Schools across the U.S. have sharply restricted student use of phones during the school day. We evaluate one type of restriction—lockable phone pouches—using nationwide data combining a large-scale teacher survey, GPS pings, standardized test scores, and school administrative records, along with sales records from the largest pouch provider. Using a staggered difference-in-differences design, we find that pouch adoption substantially reduces phone use as measured by GPS pings and teacher reports. In the first year after adoption, disciplinary incidents increase, and we find suggestive evidence that student subjective well-being falls, consistent with short-term disruption. However, disciplinary effects fade, while the estimated effects on well-being appear to recover and become positive in later years. For academic achievement, average effects on test scores are consistently close to zero. High schools see modest positive effects, particularly in math, while middle schools see small negative effects. We find little evidence of effects on school attendance and no clear evidence of improvements in self-reported classroom attention or perceived online bullying.

Theory posits that mandatory disclosure influences peer firms' learning from stock prices in two non‐mutually exclusive ways: intra‐industry information transfers and the reallocation of information acquisition efforts. Using mandatory segment disclosure as our setting, we document a decrease in investment‐ q sensitivity for peers of disclosing firms. This effect is stronger among peers with greater economic links to disclosing firms and peers with the greatest incentives to glean information from prices. Our findings provide novel evidence that mandatory disclosure can have significant negative externalities on peer firms' investment efficiency via a managerial learning from the stock price channel. These insights inform regulators assessing the economic consequences of mandatory disclosure, while also assisting managers who rely on information from stock prices to guide investment decisions.