I develop and estimate a structural equilibrium model of the college market. Students, having heterogeneous abilities and preferences, make application decisions subject to uncertainty and application costs. Colleges, observing noisy measures of student ability, choose tuition and admissions policies to compete for better students. Tuition, applications, admissions, and enrollment are joint equilibrium outcomes. I estimate the model using the NLSY97 via a three-step procedure to deal with potential multiple equilibria. I use the model to examine the extent to which college enrollment can be increased by expanding college supply and to assess the importance of various measures of student ability.

Many countries use college-major-specific admissions policies that require a student to choose a college-major pair jointly. Given the potential of student-major mismatches, we explore the equilibrium effects of postponing student choice of major. We develop a sorting equilibrium model under the college-major-specific admissions regime, allowing for match uncertainty and peer effects. We estimate the model using Chilean data. We introduce the counterfactual regime as a Stackelberg game in which a social planner chooses college-specific admissions policies and students make enrollment decisions, learn about their fits to various majors before choosing one. Our estimates indicate that switching from the baseline to the counterfactual regime leads to a 1% increase in average student welfare and that it is more likely to benefit female, low-income and/or low-ability students.

We study the optimal design of subsidies in an equilibrium setting, where the decisions of individual recipients impose externalities on one another. We apply the model to the case of post‐Katrina rebuilding in New Orleans under the Louisiana Road Home rebuilding grant program (RH). We estimate the structural model via indirect inference, exploiting a discontinuity in the formula for determining the size of grants, which helps isolate the causal effect of neighbors' rebuilding on one's own rebuilding choices. We find that the additional rebuilding induced by RH generated positive externalities equivalent to $4950 to each inframarginal household whose rebuilding choice was not affected by the program. Counterfactual policy experiments find that optimal subsidy policies bias grant offers against relocation, with an inverse‐U‐shaped relationship between the degree of bias and the severity of damages from the disaster.

We develop a model of crime in which the number of police, the crime rate, the arrest rate, the employment rate, and the wage rate are joint outcomes of a subgame perfect Nash equilibrium. The local government chooses the size of its police force and citizens choose among work, home, and crime alternatives. We estimate the model using metropolitan statistical area (MSA)-level data. We use the estimated model to examine the effects on crime of targeted federal transfers to local governments to increase police. We find that knowledge about unobserved MSA-specific attributes is critical for the optimal allocation of police across MSA’s.

We develop and estimate an equilibrium model of ability tracking in which schools decide how to allocate students into ability tracks and choose track-specific teacher effort; parents choose effort in response. The model is estimated using Early Childhood Longitudinal Study data. Our model suggests that a counterfactual ban on tracking would benefit low-ability students but hurt high-ability students. Ignoring effort adjustments would significantly overstate the impacts. We then illustrate the trade-offs involved when considering policies that affect schools’ tracking decisions. Setting proficiency standards to maximize average achievement would lead schools to redistribute their inputs from low- to high-ability students.

This paper examines how estimates of the deterrent effect of capital punishment depend on alternate choices of assumptions concerning the homicide process. Specific models of the homicide process represent bundles of these assumptions, which involve the unobserved heterogeneity, the relevant penalty probabilities for homicide choices, possible cross-polity parameter variation, and exchangeability between polity-time pairs that do and do not experience positive numbers of murders. We demonstrate how various assumptions have driven the conflicting findings from studies on capital punishment, and isolate a particular set of assumptions that are required to find a positive deterrent effect.

We model household choice of schools under the Boston mechanism (BM) and develop a new method, applicable to a broad class of mechanisms, to fully solve the choice problem even if it is infeasible via the traditional method. We estimate the joint distribution of household preferences and sophistication types, using administrative data from Barcelona. Counterfactual policy analyses show that a change from BM in Barcelona to the deferred-acceptance mechanism would decrease average welfare by €1,020, while a change to the top-trading-cycles mechanism would increase average welfare by €460.

Concerns about excessive mobile phone use among youth are mounting. We present estimates of behavioral and contextual peer effects, along with comprehensive evidence on how students’ own and their peers’ app usage affect academic performance, physical health, and labor market outcomes. Our analysis draws on administrative data from a Chinese university covering three student cohorts over four years. We exploit random roommate assignments, differential exposure to a policy shock (gaming restrictions for minors), and differential exposure to a discrete event (the introduction of a blockbuster video game) for identification. App usage is contagious: a one s.d. increase in roommates’ in-college app usage raises own usage by 5.8%. High app usage is harmful across all measured outcomes. A one s.d. increase in app usage reduces GPAs by 36.2% of a within-cohort-major s.d. and lowers wages by 2.3%. Roommates’ app usage reduces a student’s GPA and wages through both disruptions and behavioral spillovers, generating a total negative effect that exceeds half the magnitude of the impact from the student’s own app usage. Extending China’s three-hour-per-week gaming restriction for minors to college students would boost their initial wages by 0.9%. High-frequency GPS and app usage data show that heavy app users spend less time in study halls, are more frequently late or absent from class, and get less sleep.