Research

We study how shortening physicians' work schedules affects healthcare provision and patient mortality. We exploit a 1982 reform in Denmark that strongly restricted hospital doctors' overtime, weekend, and nighttime shifts. Consistent with substitution from hours to workers, vacancies increased by 35% one-year after implementation. Using a dose-response difference-in-differences strategy, we leverage variation in the timing and intensity of the policy across hospital wards with different pre-reform reliance on overtime to document three main results. First, wards where labor demand changed the most substantially decreased in-hospital mortality rates, especially among emergency admissions. Second, while more physicians led to more admissions, better mortality outcomes are not explained by shifts in patient composition. Third, persistent post-discharge mortality declines and no change in readmissions or duration of stays suggest that gains were not at the expense of higher patient turnover. Our findings are consistent with overtime regulations correcting inefficiently long work hours in a frictional labor market.

We study the effect of exposure to peers with college-educated parents on the school outcomes of children from less educated households. For identification, we exploit within-family-by-year variation to control for the significant non-random sorting of parents into schools, and time-varying shocks to the family environment. We use a rich administrative data from Portugal, a school system with some of the largest gaps in educational attainment by children's socioeconomic status among OECD countries. We find that moving a student from the 10th to the 90th percentile in the distribution of exposure to children with college-educated parents is equivalent to closing about a fifth of the gap in grade repetition by parental education. We show that the effect on grade repetition is partly driven by improved school performance, consistent with a social contagion type of mechanism. However, we also show suggestive evidence that schools fail fewer students who were eligible to repeat when faced with higher concentrations of students with college-educated parents.

This systematic and large-scale reproduction effort tests the reproducibility and robustness of economics and political science, contributing to a growing literature on research credibility and self-correction in science. We reproduced original analyses and conducted robustness checks of 110 articles recently published in leading economics and political science journals, all of which have mandatory data and code sharing policies. We found that over 85% of published claims were computationally reproducible. In robustness checks, our re-analyses led to 72% of statistically significant estimates to remain significant and in the same direction, and the median reproduced effect size is (nearly) the same as the originally published effect size (that is, 99% of the published effect size). Additionally, six independent research teams examined 12 pre-specified hypotheses about determinants of robustness. Research teams with more experience found lower levels of robustness, and robustness correlated with neither author characteristics nor data availability.

Study abroad migration is the fastest growing international migration flow. However, the college completion rates of students from low-income countries are often modest in OECD countries, raising the hypothesis that these migrants are poorly informed about the costs and benefits of their decision. Our work tests this hypothesis by running a lab-in-the-field experiment where graduating high school students in Cape Verde are faced with incentivized decisions to apply for college studies abroad. Our results show that potential migrants react strongly to information about the availability of financial support and about college completion rates. Since subjects' prior beliefs on availability of financial support are overestimated, it is likely that study migrants need to shift their time from study to work after uninformed migration, which likely harms their scholar performance. Policies that inform potential migrants of actual study funding possibilities should decrease study migration flows but are likely to improve successful graduation.

How do positive signals of academic ability change educational choices and future performance? I study the consequences of receiving a higher grade in a national standardized test on students' outcomes. For identification, I exploit the random assignment of graders to anonymized tests in the end of middle school, using administrative data from Portugal. First, I show that there is substantial grade manipulation in this blind grading context, consistent with graders being lenient. I then use bunching methods to identify the plausibly causal effect of leniency on students' choices. I find that low performers who benefit from lenient grading are significantly less likely to repeat the same school grade, and encouraged to enrol in a more demanding high school track. However, I cannot reject that there is no impact on academic achievement in the medium- and long-term. Finally, although graders do not observe test takers characteristics, I show that leniency in grading is selective on characteristics that may be indirectly inferred from the test. In particular, girls are marginally more likely to be bumped up.