Research Brief Library

Gaining permanent residency leads to a sharp, immediate, and persistent increase in job switching of 21.7 percentage points and a 5.7% increase in earnings, 56% of which is attributable to workers sorting into higher-wage firms.

Field experiments reveal that Facebook and Instagram compete broadly for user time, not narrowly with Snapchat for social networking. When platform usage drops, only 6-16% of diverted time shifts to other social networks; the rest scatters across gaming, YouTube, TikTok,...

Though direct lending has grown rapidly in recent years, it is primarily concentrated among firms in specific industries and specific geographies where private equity investment is prevalent. Large parts of the US economy remain essentially untouched by direct lending activity.

Variation in financial reporting quality explains 10-20% of within-industry productivity differences. Audits boost productivity independently of management practices through two channels: improving managers’ internal information and constraining tax-motivated underreporting. The effects are strongest in competitive, low-margin industries and among younger...

Most bank depositors rarely shop for better rates and stay with the same bank for nearly a decade, on average. This “sleepiness” accounts for more than half of banks’ deposit franchise value while also creating stability in the banking system.

Emergency department visits for drug and alcohol use increase by 20-30% following cash benefit receipt but do not respond to food stamp receipt. This is the first direct comparison showing that cash and food stamps affect consumption differently in the...

Collapsing students’ responses to individual test questions to single scores discards useful information about teacher efficacy and student knowledge that predicts outcomes like graduation, discipline, and future earnings.

Parents feel pressured to adopt AI for their children’s education if they know that other children are using the technology, despite its uncertain long-term consequences. This social pressure outweighs parents’ personal desire to restrict AI use in classrooms.

Despite the aggressive post-pandemic rate hikes, which pushed Australian mortgage rates up by over 4 percentage points and monthly payments up by $13,800, adjustable-rate borrowers did not cut their spending because they tapped into large savings buffers they had built...

A six-month experiment with 459 diverse Chicago families shows that providing high-quality math apps to children of parents without college degrees improved their math skills by 0.17 standard deviations, closing roughly one-third of the initial education-based achievement gap. The intervention...