High-stakes exams are often administered at designated test centers, requiring many students to test in unfamiliar environments. We investigate whether such arrangements impact students' test performance and, by extension, access to educational opportunities. Using unique administrative data from China’s national college entrance examination between 2016 and 2018 and its random assignment of test centers, we find that students assigned to a non-home school score 0.14 standard deviations lower than classmates testing at their home school, and they are 3.8 percentage points less likely to be admitted to college. The performance penalty is most pronounced in STEM subjects and partly driven by longer travel distances. Furthermore, it has significant inequality implications: the penalty is especially severe for low-achieving students and those from disadvantaged backgrounds. As test centers are predominantly located in high-performing schools, such ostensibly neutral assignment policies may unintentionally exacerbate existing achievement gaps between privileged and less privileged groups. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that exam location accounts for over 7.6% of the observed performance gap between students from test-center and non-test-center schools. 

We investigate how targeted groups react politically to racially motivated hate crimes within their communities. Combining incident-level administrative data on hate crimes in Los Angeles County from 2014 to 2022 with individual voter files, we exploit the hyperlocal variation in the geography and timing of these crimes. We find that serious anti-Hispanic hate crimes increase voter turnout among nearby Hispanics by 1.6 percentage points compared to nearby Whites. Communities with dense Hispanic populations and Hispanic advocacy and community service organizations are primarily responsible for this mobilization effect. Moreover, we demonstrate that hate crimes are associated with shifts in voters' policy preferences, particularly in the areas of crime prevention and affirmative action. Despite this, we do not find any significant differences in political participation among Black and Asian American communities following anti-Black and anti-Asian hate crimes, respectively. Los Angeles County's large Hispanic population and extensive network of community organizations may play an important role in fostering mobilization.

We show that, in contrast to classic models of voting and political advertising, mere exposure to (and thus familiarity with) a candidate may lead to greater support. Using data from Louisiana local elections, U.S. state legislature elections, and Atlantic tropical storm names from 1980 to 2022, we find that down-ballot candidates experience an increase in vote share of 7.1–10.4 percentage points when a hurricane with the same name impacts the state prior to the election. This effect persists after accounting for the inherent popularity of specific names and potential strategic responses by candidates. Our result contributes to our understanding of political campaigning and advertising markets more generally.

I study whether voters' cognitive biases affect political candidates' entry decisions. Building off the insight that in down-ballot elections, voters tend to choose the first-listed candidate due to choice fatigue and the primacy effect, I conjecture that potential candidates with late-alphabet surnames, expecting positional disadvantages on an alphabetically ordered ballot, are less likely to run for office. Using within-state variation in ballot order rules and data on 341,156 candidates running for U.S. state legislatures from 1967 to 2022, I find that  alphabetically ordered ballots have an impact on candidate entry, resulting in a 3.68 percentage-point decrease in the representation of late-alphabet candidates (equivalent to a 16.4\% reduction). Moreover, alphabetically ordered ballots may unintentionally impact minority candidate entry, due to these candidates' distinctive distribution of surname initials.

We study favoritism in the selection of elite scientific talent, by examining the relationship between host institution affiliation and performance in the Chinese Science Olympiad, where a gold medal guarantees a student's admission to top universities. Using hand-collected participant-level data (2003 - 2021), we find that students affiliated with the host province have a significantly higher winning probability, and the effect is more pronounced in host provinces where corruption norms are more prevalent. We further present evidence suggestive of cheating behavior using a portion of the contest vulnerable to information leakage, as well as the centralized post-Olympiad selection outside the control of host provinces. Together, our findings shed light on the crucial role of the organizational structure in designing equitable assessment systems for talent.

This paper examines whether sitting by a window can influence cognitive performance in a high-stakes setting. Leveraging unique administrative data from Chinese college entrance exams with randomized seating assignments, we find that a seat by a window with an outside view significantly enhances cognitive performance, resulting in 9.1 percent of a standard deviation increase in exam scores. Further evidence suggests that this finding aligns with Attention Restoration Theory. This study highlights the value of restorative environments in enhancing cognitive performance.