Using unique, new, matched UMETRICS data on people employed on research projects and Author-ity data on biomedical publications, this paper shows that National Institutes of Health funding stimulates research by supporting the teams that conduct it. While faculty—both principal investigators (PIs) and other faculty—and their productivity are heavily affected by funding, so are trainees and staff. The largest effects of funding on research output are ripple effects on publications that do not include PIs. While funders focus on research output from projects, they would be well advised to consider how funding ripples through the wide range of people, including trainees and staff, employed on projects.

AbstractI find that the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which conferred protection from deportation and work authorization to undocumented immigrants who had been brought to the U.S. as children, increased eligible immigrants’ likelihood of having health insurance coverage. Exploiting a cutoff rule in the eligibility criteria of DACA, I implement a difference-in-regression-discontinuities design. The insured rate increased by up to 4.3 percentage points more for DACA-eligible immigrants than for ineligible immigrants following DACA. Two-thirds of this increase is accounted for by upticks in employer-sponsored and privately purchased insurance. The findings are also consistent with immigrants becoming less averse to approach health institutions, and taking up medical financial assistance at a higher rate.

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We study the city-level crime effects of immigration using a large migratory episode in U.S. cities: the resettlement of postwar Indochinese refugees in the 1970s-1980s. We examine the impact of these migratory inflows, where the destination of refugees was largely exogeneously determined, on the incidence of various types of crime by aggregating county-level crime data. Results from a difference-in-differences analysis imply that the cities receiving the heaviest inflows of refugees did not experience differential trends in property crime or violent crime rates following this period; while there is an upward impact on murder rates, pre-trends do not match for this variable, and further analysis via the synthetic control method show that any upward impact is driven primarily by a temporary (5 years at most) surge in three metropolitan statistical areas. Our results suggest that consistent with prior literature, even a large refugee inflow may not by itself generate persistent crime increases.