An immigration shock has an ambiguous effect on inflation, because there are multiple channels working in both directions. Cross-country empirical evidence on Venezuelan immigration in Latin America points to a net disinflationary effect. We study immigration and inflation in a general equilibrium model with search frictions in the labor market, which we calibrate to Chile, an emerging country that has experienced substantial immigration in recent years. A net disinflationary effect is consistent with a labor supply channel dominating an aggregate demand channel. We also find that the systematic response of monetary policy is quantitatively important for the propagation of the shock.

The relationship between completed education and adult cognition is investigated using data from the Indonesia Family Life Survey. We compare adult siblings to account for shared, difficult-to-measure characteristics that likely affect this relationship, including genetics and parental preferences and investments. After establishing the importance of shared family background factors, we document substantively large, significant effects of education on cognition in models with sibling fixed effects. In contrast, the strong positive correlation between education and adult height is reduced to zero in models with sibling fixed effects, suggesting little contamination in the education-height association beyond factors common to siblings.

We analyze the effect of remedial math education on student outcomes by use of data from a large US public university and a regression discontinuity approach. Students with different math preparation levels are placed in remedial courses of varying difficulty. Our study finds that remediation increases graduation rates by 22.5 percentage points for students with lower math skills in math-intensive majors. However, students with stronger math backgrounds in advanced remedial classes do not see improved graduation outcomes. Additionally, implementation of an adaptive learning remedial program increased passing rates by 9.5 percentage points, leading to a 4.5 percentage point rise in 5-year graduation probability.

We study recovery from an adverse early-life environmental shock. First, we show that exposure to an adverse rainfall shock in the first year of life led to lower educational attainment for exposed Indonesians. Next, by use of geographic variation in the intensity of an Indonesian primary school construction program, we find that improved access to primary schools facilitated complete recovery from the educational deficit. The program had no effect on the education of individuals who did not experience the adverse rainfall shock. This was, in part, a result of deteriorating school quality and increased competition to get into middle schools.

We present the results of a field experiment showing that gender differences in willingness to guess depend on the numerical or conceptual nature of the question for the same material/topic. When there is a penalty for incorrect answers, females are significantly more likely to skip questions that involve calculations, while they answer significantly more questions than males when they are asked to figure out the truthfulness of a concept. Differences in risk propensity help to explain the gender gap in numerical questions, and differences in confidence help to explain the gender gap in conceptual questions.

Early-childhood interventions are important for poverty reduction but difficult to target. We study two interventions in rural India for children below age 2 that are simple and easy to scale: a durable device for iron fortification at home and caregiver training in dialogic reading. Outcomes were measured blinded. When delivered together, the interventions improved receptive language skills of children who were not anemic at baseline, suggesting that health endowment complements parental investments in the production of human capital. The dialogic reading intervention further shows positive spillovers on untreated children. Overall, shorter-lived interventions are potentially effective in healthier populations.

This paper provides evidence on how racial differences in the classification of learning and intellectual disabilities bias inferences on labor market outcomes of vocational rehabilitation program clients. Estimates using Rehabilitation Services Administration data from Virginia imply that Whites who have learning disabilities have worse labor market outcomes than non-Whites who have learning disabilities. We argue this unusual finding reflects racial differences in how disabilities are classified. Using an endogenous disability classification model, we find substantial biases in the estimated labor market coefficients. At minimum, the estimated White-Black employment gap is biased down by 3.2% and the earnings gap by 10%.