We study how public school teachers use paid sick leave. Most US sick leave schemes operate as individualized credit accounts: Paid leave is earned, and unused leave accumulates. We construct a unique dataset of daily leave balances and behavior among 982 teachers for 2010–2018. Sick leave use increases during flu season, and evidence indicates that the average teacher does not use sick leave for leisure, though some subsets of teachers (e.g., the young and inexperienced) do. Usage increases with leave balance; the elasticity is around 0.4. Further, teachers with higher balances are less likely to work sick, particularly during flu season.

Multinational firms (MNEs) dominate trade flows, yet their foreign production decisions are often ignored in firm-level studies of exporting and importing. Using newly merged data on U.S. firms’ trade and global production, we show that MNEs are more likely to trade with countries that are proximate to their affiliates. We rationalize these patterns with a new source of firm-level scale economies that arises when fixed costs to source from, or sell in, a market are shared across the MNE’s plants. These shared fixed costs create interdependencies between firms’ production and trade locations that generate third-market responses to trade policy changes.

We identify the distributional and quantile marginal treatment effect functions when the outcome is right-censored. Our method requires a conditionally exogenous instrument and random censoring. We propose asymptotically consistent semi-parametric estimators and valid inferential procedures for the target functions . To illustrate, we evaluate the effect of alternative sentences (fines and community service vs. no punishment) on recidivism in Brazil. Our results highlight substantial treatment effect heterogeneity: we find that people whom most judges would punish take longer to recidivate, while people who would be punished only by strict judges recidivate at an earlier date than if they were not punished.

Global phenomena, such as climate change, often have local impacts that are spatially correlated. We show that greater spatial correlation of productivities can increase international inequality by increasing the correlation between a country's productivity and its gains from trade. We confirm this prediction using a half-century of exogenous variation in the spatial correlation of agricultural productivities induced by a global climatic phenomenon. We introduce this general-equilibrium effect into projections of climate-change impacts that typically omit spatial linkages and therefore do not account for the global scope of climate change. We project greater international inequality, with higher welfare losses across Africa.

We provide the first estimates of intergenerational income mobility using tax data for a large developing country, namely Brazil. We measure formal income from tax and payroll data, and we train machine learning models on census and survey data to predict informal income. We quantify the estimation bias resulting from income imputation and other sources of measurement error, and show that such bias remains negligible in our context. A 10 percentile increase in parental income rank is associated on average with a 5.5 percentile increase in child income rank, with considerable variation across sociodemographic groups and geographical areas.

We experimentally evaluate group-based financial education, savings account access, or both for members of Ugandan youth groups. We measure both short- and long-run impacts with one- and five-year endline household surveys. Education, but not account access, increases measured financial knowledge and trust at one year. At five years, knowledge effects essentially disappear, and trust effects weaken. However, savings and income increase for each treatment at both endlines, which is noteworthy given the interventions’ low cost and the long time horizon of our second endline. Exploring potential mechanisms, we find evidence consistent with multiple pathways to behavior change and outcome improvement.