We look at the relationship between crop revenues and mortality in the Midwest from 1980 to 2019. For identification, we combine an exposure design with a two-way (i.e., county and year) fixed effects estimator. On average, a decrease in soybean revenue is associated with an increase in mortality: A 10-percent decrease in soybean revenues is associated with a 0.1-percent increase in the age-adjusted all-cause death rate, or about 170 more deaths throughout the Midwest in 2024. Our findings are driven by individuals 65 and older, by women, and they appear mediated by cardiovascular disease and mental health-related issues.

Public education in developing countries is often deficient, leading to increasing learning deficits as students age. A trade-off exists between ensuring uniformly high standards and introducing reforms that allow teachers flexibility. Through a 300 school RCT in Odisha, India, we compare the effects on Class 9 students of T1) rigidly defined remedial lessons that take time away from the curriculum, T2) teacher determined remedial lessons, or T3) control. Both interventions increased students test scores 0.11SD, about 60 percent of a year of learning, with gains throughout the learning distribution. The quality of implementation was high in both arms. Few teachers took advantage of the flexibility offered and defaulted into the regimented version.

Health behaviors are plagued by self-control problems, and commitment devices are frequently proposed as a solution. We show that a simple alternative works even better: appointments. We randomly offer HIV testing appointments and financial commitment devices to high-risk men in Malawi. Appointments are much more effective than financial commitment devices, more than doubling testing rates. In contrast, most men who take up financial commitment devices lose their investments. Appointments address procrastination without the potential drawback of commitment failure, and also address limited memory problems. Appointments have the potential to increase demand for healthcare in the developing world.). We thank Susan Watkins for her extensive guidance and mentorship on this project. We are grateful for insightful comments from

In December 2014, the Center for Migration Studies of New York (CMS) released a paper that provides new estimates of the US unauthorized resident population (Warren 2014). The paper describes the development of a new dataset which has detailed information about unauthorized residents, derived from data collected in the US Census Bureaus American Community Survey (ACS). The dataset will be useful to scholars, researchers, service-providers, and government officials in crafting, implementing, and evaluating programs that serve noncitizens, including the unauthorized. In addition, the new estimates provide an opportunity to examine the dramatic changes in unauthorized immigration in the past two decades and the assumptions that have shaped US policies and public opinion.

The canonical model of expenditure choices assumes that people are able to smooth their consumption. However, extensive empirical and theoretical work suggests that consumption smoothing is imperfect, so the precise timing of individuals income may affect their behavior. We report results from a randomized field experiment in Malawi that varied the timing of workers income receipt in two ways. First, payments were made either in weekly installments or as a monthly lump sum, in order to vary the extent to which workers had to save up to make profitable investments. Second, payments at a local market were made either on the weekend market day (Saturday) or the day before the market day (Friday), in order to vary the degree of temptation workers faced when receiving payments. We provide novel evidence that the frequency of payments matters for workers ability to benefit from high-return investment opportunities. Workers in the monthly group have more cash left in the week after the last payday when the lump sum payment was made. Moreover, they are 9.5 percentage points more likely than the weekly payment group (mean of 6.3%) to invest in a risk-free short-term bond that required a large payment and that was offered by the project in the week after the last payday. We argue that this result is driven by the lump sum groups decreased savings constraints relative to the weekly payment group. In contrast, despite anecdotal evidence and suggestive survey data that, in this studys context, market days increase the temptation to overspend, being paid at the site of the local market on Saturday compared to Friday did not strongly matter for expenditure levels or temptation spending

Episode grouper software offers a potential framework for developing important components of a pay-for-performance system for healthcare providers. If the costs for treating health conditions can be computed, then policymakers can in principle benchmark different providers' cost distributions and reward the most efficient. This article applies two of the most prominent commercial groupers and examines the properties of the cost distributions calculated for their constructed episodes. The analysis reveals that episode cost distributions exhibit substantial variation and skewness, suggesting the need for innovative risk adjustment methods prior to utilizing groupers for the purpose of physician profiling.