This paper studies how the design of emissions standards affects road safety. U.S. fuel-economy and greenhouse-gas standards are indexed to vehicle footprint, with larger vehicles facing less stringent targets. While intended to accommodate vehicles of different sizes, this design rewards manufacturers for making their vehicles larger, which can relax the effective standard and make roads more dangerous for pedestrians and occupants of smaller vehicles. Exploiting variation in the regulatory reward for enlargement across vehicles, I show that vehicles facing greater upsizing pressure grew disproportionately once footprint indexing began and that road deaths increased as these vehicles entered local fleets. To examine whether emissions can be reduced without these safety costs, I develop and estimate an equilibrium model of vehicle demand and design in a market with tradable compliance credits. Because tighter standards raise the price of compliance credits, they raise the value of enlargement whenever targets are indexed to size. Counterfactuals show that removing the reward for size while adjusting average stringency to keep emissions unchanged would have averted about 2,700 road deaths per year from 2013 to 2024. While making the existing indexed standard more stringent would have reduced emissions but increased road deaths, pairing this tightening with a one-quarter reduction in the extra emissions allowed for each additional square foot would have delivered nearly the same emissions reduction as tightening alone while reducing road deaths below existing levels.

How do local churches shape economic and social life? We study this question in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), the nation's largest Protestant denomination, exploiting two shocks to congregational life: pastor deaths and pastor convictions for sexual abuse. Using matched-controls event study designs, we show that pastor deaths lead to church closures, while convictions generate large and persistent reductions in Baptist attendance and engagement. Both shocks reduce labor-force participation, raise unemployment, and lower nearby housing prices for several years. The shocks diverge on outcomes plausibly affected by religious beliefs rather than networks: convictions shift two-party Democratic vote share leftward and increase opioid mortality, while deaths produce no detectable changes in either. This pattern supports a framework in which deaths primarily disrupt access to congregational networks, while convictions additionally erode religious norms that shape political and health behaviors.

I study how the deregulation of radio content in the U.S. transformed local politics and public health outcomes. The 1987 repeal of the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine removed requirements for broadcasters to air contrasting viewpoints on political issues and triggered the expansion of conservative talk radio. I find that quasi-exogenous exposure to growth in conservative talk radio raised Republican vote shares across presidential, Senate, and House elections, and also increased “deaths of despair” (alcohol-, overdose-, and suicide-related mortality). These effects emerge in the early 1990s and persist decades later, underscoring how partisan media ecosystems can reshape both politics and public health.

School-based health centers (SBHCs) aim to improve child and adolescent health by providing care at school, but evidence on their causal and long-run effects remains limited. We estimate these effects using difference-in-differences designs that exploit staggered SBHC openings relative to matched control schools. Linking thirteen years of near-universe psychotropic prescription data to more than 1,800 SBHC openings, we find persistent increases in youth antidepressant and antipsychotic use. Preliminary analyses using nationwide Medicaid claims also indicate that SBHC openings increase health-care utilization. We also use Texas administrative education records linked to 54 SBHC openings to estimate effects on attendance, disciplinary outcomes, high school completion, college enrollment and graduation, and longer-run economic outcomes. Together, the project examines how school-based access to care affects both health-care use and students’ broader trajectories.

Using thirteen years of U.S. outpatient prescription claims covering more than 100 million psychotropic prescriptions, we distinguish within-physician learning from differences across medical-school cohorts in guideline-deviant prescribing. Although older physicians prescribe “red-flag” doses more often in the cross-section, following fixed cohorts over time reveals that red-flag prescribing declines and becomes less dispersed, consistent with learning-by-doing and selection. The apparent age gradient is instead driven largely by cohort differences: more recently trained physicians begin with safer prescribing patterns, while earlier cohorts retain higher baseline propensities to deviate from guidelines. An event study around the 2011 FDA revision discouraging high-dose citalopram shows that physicians of all ages respond quickly, but persistent cohort gaps remain. The results suggest that experience improves prescribing within physicians even as differences in training generate lasting disparities across cohorts.

This paper estimates the effects of fatal school shootings on youth psychotropic drug use over the subsequent 5.5 years. Using an event study approach that compares trends in drugs prescribed by providers practicing close to a school shooting relative to those practicing slightly farther away, we find that fatal school shootings lead to large increases in youth psychotropic drug use that persist for years after the event. These effects are driven primarily by increases in prescriptions for antidepressants and antipsychotics and are observed both among youth who were previously taking psychotropic medication and those who were not.