Using the largest avail­able sam­ple of lot­teried appli­cants to char­ter schools, Joshua Angrist, Parag Pathak, and Christopher Walters inves­ti­gate school-level and student-level expla­na­tions for dif­fer­ences in Massachusetts.  The results attribute achieve­ment dif­fer­ences to vary­ing school set­tings, stu­dent demo­graph­ics, and ped­a­gog­i­cal fea­tures of urban char­ter schools. A grow­ing body of evi­dence sug­gests that urban char­ter schools …

John Y. Campbell, Stefano Giglio, and Parag Pathak use data on house trans­ac­tions in the state of Massachusetts over the last 20 years to show that houses sold after fore­clo­sure, or close in time to the death or bank­ruptcy of at least one seller, are sold at lower prices than other houses. Foreclosure dis­counts are par­tic­u­larly large …

A new study by David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson explores the effect of ris­ing Chinese import com­pe­ti­tion between 1990 and 2007 on local U.S. labor mar­kets to reveal a large impact not only within the scope of man­u­fac­tur­ing, but also on worker and house­hold wel­fare. While freer trade with coun­tries at any income …