This paper examines the impact of the 2014–2015 decline in oil prices on student academic performance. We employ a difference-in-differences identification strategy that leverages two sources of variation: (1) pre-period fuel costs and fuel usage across states, which generate differential exposure to the oil price shock; and (2) cohort-level variation in exposure to the treatment period, based on students’ kindergarten entry year. Using county-grade level test score data from the Stanford Education Data Archive, we find that falling oil prices improved student performance. Math and reading scores increased by 0.02 to 0.06 standard deviations. These gains were largest among Hispanic, female, Asian, and economically disadvantaged students. The results remain consistent across different model specifications. Our findings reveal that energy price changes can have meaningful effects on educational outcomes, demonstrating an important but previously overlooked connection between economic conditions and student achievement.
This article uses responses from the 2025 National Quinquennial Survey on Teaching and Assessment Methods in Undergraduate Economics, the seventh iteration of the Becker and Watts effort begun in 1995, to examine assessment methods across four course types: introductory, intermediate theory, statistics and econometrics, and other upper-division field courses. The work emphasizes pre- and post-COVID-19 changes. Results show increased average grade weights on homework/problem sets and decreased average weights on long-answer exam questions across course types and increased average weight on class participation in introductory courses. Aside from these changes, assessment weights changed little overall, while respondent demographics are the most diverse to date.
How nearby hospitals adjust financially after a neighboring closure may depend on ownership incentives, yet existing research has not examined this variation by ownership type. Using publicly available cost report data from the National Academy for State Health Policy Hospital Cost Tool for short-term hospitals from 2011 through 2022, we compare hospitals with exactly two neighbors within sixty miles that experienced a neighboring closure to those retaining two neighbors, ensuring comparable baseline market structure. For-profit hospitals show the largest post-closure increases in Charge-to-cost, though pre-closure trends make this pattern suggestive, while the for-profit Net-profit-margin gain is the best-identified result and is comparable in size to the non-profit gain. Governmental hospitals show changes indistinguishable from zero, motivating ownership-differentiated policy responses.
This paper presents a classroom game about comparative advantage that demonstrates that gains from trade increase with the heterogeneity of opportunity costs between trading partners. Students allocate their labor endowment toward the production of two types of candy in three rounds. In the first round, students produce and consume candies under autarky. In the second round, students can trade. In the final round, each group becomes absolutely better at producing the good for which they have a comparative advantage and absolutely worse at producing the good for which they have a comparative disadvantage. The consumption of an abundance of goods in this final stage after trade provides a powerful lesson that greater differences in opportunity costs lead to larger gains from trade.
Over the past two decades, telehealth has become an increasingly common form of healthcare delivery in the United States. As healthcare providers continue to invest more into telehealth, the capabilities of virtual care have expanded rapidly. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the demand for telehealth reached new heights as people were forced to quarantine indoors and avoid in person contact for extended periods of time. We combine data on monthly, state-level insurance claims, rates of COVID-19, google trends, and local demographics and provide a descriptive analysis of the demand for telehealth for mental health visits during the pandemic. Results indicate that mental health claims increase with COVID-19 deaths, and as the COVID-19 deaths rates increase, this relationship concentrates among adults 50 years and older. The pandemic appears to have increased the demand for tele-mental health among older adults who were more susceptible to death due to the virus. We also investigate the relationship between mental health claims and expectations of income loss due to unemployment using the US Census Household Pulse Survey. We find that younger people, ages 0-18, file more mental health claims as they expect more adults in their household to lose income from unemployment.
