Research

This paper shows that the intended effects of a common class of progressive college admission policies can be weakened by strategic pre-college behavior. Exploiting the public disclosure of a relative-ranking–based affirmative action policy in Chile and combining it with comprehensive administrative data covering all college applicants nationwide, I find that students with scope to benefit strategically are about 50 percent more likely to transfer high schools during twelfth grade. While these students are more likely to enroll in highly selective college majors, they are less likely to graduate on time. Using simulation-based counterfactuals, I show that strategic school switching substantially attenuates the policy's distributional impact, reducing admissions of disadvantaged students to the most selective universities by approximately 30 percent.

A desirable property of democratic elections is that they should not be influenced by forces that reveal no information about the candidate. However, the extant literature suggests that precipitation has a significant impact on electoral outcomes. This paper investigates an understudied dimension of weather—sunshine. Using novel daily weather measurements from satellites, linked to county-level U.S. Presidential electoral returns from 1948–2016, we document how sunshine affects the decision making of voters. We find that election-day exposure to sunshine increases support for the Democratic party on average. Additionally, we show that—contrary to prior findings that do not control for sunshine—precipitation has no detectable impact on partisan support, but universally depresses turnout. To rationalize our results we propose a mechanism whereby sunshine modulates voter mood which causes a change in voter choice, while precipitation only impacts turnout through increasing the cost of voting. We then build a theoretical model, which features this mechanism, and generates additional tests that find support in the data. Our main result—that election-day sunshine noticeably impacts voter choice—highlights the need to reduce the effect of election-day shocks (e.g. by allowing early voting). Furthermore, our results regarding precipitation suggest that reducing costs to voting does not confer partisan benefits—a potentially policy-relevant finding for the current vote-by-mail discussion.

School systems in low- and middle-income countries routinely respond to low achievement by holding students back a grade—a remedy that consumes a full year of schooling and seldom raises learning. We evaluate a cheaper alternative within the same system: a short, government-run remedial summer camp in the Dominican Republic. Randomizing invitations among overage students in grades 3–5, we find that the average attendee gains about 0.10 SD in test scores—roughly a fifth of a year of learning, produced in a tenth of the time—and that, per dollar, the camp delivers about 50% more learning than a year of schooling, the resource grade retention consumes. Camp effectiveness, however, is heterogeneous: a camp one standard deviation above the mean is nearly twice as effective as the average. For systems where grade retention remains the default response to overage, these results make the case for short remedial camps as a far cheaper way to recover lost learning.