We quantify how pollution affects aggregate productivity and welfare in spatial equilibrium. We document a robust pattern in which skilled workers in China emigrate away from polluted cities, more than the unskilled. These patterns are evident under various empirical specifications, such as when instrumenting for pollution using distant upwind power-plants, or thermal inversions that trap pollutants. Pollution changes the spatial distribution of skilled and unskilled workers, which increases returns-to-skill in cities that the educated emigrate from. We quantify the loss in aggregate productivity due to this re-sorting by estimating a spatial equilibrium model. Counterfactual simulations show that reducing pollution increases productivity through spatial re-sorting by approximately as much as the direct health benefits of clean air. We identify a new channel through which pollution lowers aggregate productivity significantly. Hukou mobility restrictions exacerbate welfare losses. Skilled workers’ aversion to pollution explains a substantial portion of the wage-gap between cities.

In the United States, rural and low-income communities have difficulty attracting and retaining physicians, potentially adversely impacting health outcomes. With a limited supply of physicians completing medical school at US universities, foreign-born and educated physicians provide a potential source of supply in underserved areas. For international medical school graduates (IMGs) the terms of the commonly used J-1 visa require a return to the home country for two years following employment in medical residency. Our analysis examines the extent to which the Conrad 30 Visa Waiver impacts the supply of physicians at state and local levels, particularly in areas designated as medically underserved. Changes in the federal limit on the number of waivers per state, combined with variation in the state-level restrictions on eligible specialties, and geographies in which physicians can work, provide evidence on the role of visa restrictions in limiting the supply of doctors. Expansion of the cap on visa waivers increased the supply of IMGs, particularly in states that did not limit waiver recipients to primary care physicians or particular places of employment. There is little evidence of reductions in US-trained doctors in states where IMG increases were the largest, suggesting little evidence for crowding out.

We highlight a lesser-known consequence of China’s integration into the world economy: the rise of services trade. We demonstrate how the US’s trade deficit in goods cycles back as a surplus in US exports of education services. Focusing on China’s accession to the World Trade Organization, we show that Chinese cities more exposed to trade liberalization sent more students to US universities. Growth in housing income/wealth allowed Chinese families to afford US tuition, and more students financed their studies using personal funds. Our estimates suggest that recent trade wars could cost US universities around $1.1 bn in annual tuition revenue.

Canonical models of entry into crime emphasize occupational sorting on economic incentives. We attempt to isolate the occupation-choice dimension of criminal participation responses to disincentives for formal employment. We link administrative socioeconomic microdata with the universe of arrests in Medell´ın over a decade, and exploit exogenous variation in formal-sector employment around a socioeconomic-score cutoff, below which individuals receive benefits if not formally employed. We model the various mechanisms by which the policy variation we study could affect both idiosyncratic and occupational criminality. Regression discontinuity estimates confirm this policy unintentionally reduced formal-sector employment and generated a corresponding increase in arrests associated with criminal enterprise activity. Consistent with an occupational choice interpretation as modeled, we find no effects on crimes unlikely to be associated with organized entities, such as crimes of impulse or opportunity. Effects on arrests are strongest in neighborhoods with more opportunities to join criminal enterprises.

The economic consequences of large-scale government investments in education depend on general equilibrium effects in both the labor market and education sector. I develop a general equilibrium model that captures the consequences of massive countrywide schooling initiatives. I provide unbiased estimates of the model’s elasticities using a Regression Discontinuity design derived from Indian government policy. The earnings returns to a year of education are 13.4%, and the general equilibrium labor market effects are substantial: they depress the returns by 6.6 percentage points. These general equilibrium effects have distributional consequences across cohorts and skill groups: as a result of the policy, unskilled workers are better off and skilled workers worse off.

The COVID-19 pandemic brought the dual crises of disease and the containment policies designed to mitigate it. Yet, there is little evidence on the impacts of these policies on women in lower-income countries, where there may be limited social safety nets to absorb these shocks. We conduct a large phone survey and leverage India's geographically varied containment policies to estimate the association between the pandemic and containment policies and measures of women's well being, including mental health and food security. On aggregate, the pandemic resulted in dramatic income losses, increases in food insecurity, and declines in female mental health. While potentially crucial to stem the spread of COVID-19, the greater prevalence of containment policies is associated with increased food insecurity, particularly for women, and reduced female mental health. For surveyed women, moving from zero to average containment levels is associated with a 38% increase in the likelihood of reporting more depression, a 73% increase in reporting more exhaustion, and a 44% increase in reporting more anxiety. Women whose social position may make them more vulnerable those with daughters and those living in female-headed households experience even larger declines in mental health.

We investigate the effects of job displacement, as a result of mass-layoffs, on criminal arrests using a novel matched employer-employee-crime dataset from Medellín, Colombia. Job displacement leads to immediate and persistent earnings losses, and higher probability of arrest for both the displaced worker and family members. Effects are pronounced for young men for whom opportunities in criminal enterprises are prevalent. Leveraging a banking policy-reform, we find that greater access to credit attenuates the criminal response to job loss. Additional results on heterogeneity and types of crime are also consistent with economic incentives contributing to criminal participation decisions.

University learning has facilitated the flow of individuals and knowledge across national borders for centuries, but the recent scale of student flows and the magnitude of tuition revenues from foreign students across the globe is unprecedented. The number of students pursuing higher education degrees outside their home countries more than doubled between 2000 and 2017 to reach 5.3 million (UNESCO 2018).

We present the first estimates of the effects of higher education investments on lower levels of schooling. Using the roll-out of elite public colleges in India, we show that investments in higher education increased educational attainment among school-age children. Private schools entered districts with new elite public colleges, and students switched from public to private schools. In addition, elite public colleges crowded in investments in electricity, roads, and water services. We find suggestive evidence that public investments in infrastructure may have reduced setup costs for private schools, and consequently, travel costs for school-going children.

Affirmative action raises the likelihood of getting into college or obtaining a government job for minority social groups in India. I find that minority group students are incentivized to stay in school longer in response to changes in future prospects. To identify causal relationships, I leverage variation in group eligibility, school age cohorts, and state-level intensity of implementation in difference-in-differences and regression discontinuity designs. These estimators consistently show that affirmative action incentivizes about 0.8 additional years of education for the average minority group student and 1.2 more years of education for a student from a marginal minority subgroup.

The number of international undergraduate students at US public research universities increased dramatically over the past two decades, alongside concurrent reductions in state support for universities. We show that these trends are closely connected as public research universities relied on foreign students to cushion the effects of falling appropriations. The growing capacity in emerging economies to pay for a US education provided opportunities for universities to recover revenues from full-fare-paying foreign students. We estimate that between 1996 and 2012, a 10 percent reduction in state appropriations led to an increase in foreign enrollment of 16 percent at public research universities. (JEL H75, I22, I23)

There is growing awareness that development-oriented government policies may be an important counterinsurgency strategy, but existing papers are usually unable to disentangle various mechanisms. Using a regression-discontinuity design, we analyze the impact of one of the world's largest anti-poverty programs, India's NREGS, on the intensity of Maoist conflict. We find short-run increases of insurgency-related violence, police-initiated attacks, and insurgent attacks on civilians. We discuss how these results relate to established theories in the literature. One mechanism consistent with the empirical patterns is that NREGS induces civilians to share more information with the state, improving police effectiveness.

We present and calibrate a dynamic model that characterizes the labor market for computer scientists. In our model, firms can recruit computer scientists from recently graduated college students, from STEM workers working in other occupations, or from a pool of foreign talent. Counterfactual simulations suggest that wages for computer scientists would have been 2.8%–3.8% higher and the number of Americans employed as computer scientists 7.0%– 13.6% higher in 2004 if firms could not hire more foreigners than they could in 1994. In contrast, total computer science employment would have been 3.8%–9.0% lower and consequently output smaller.