About
232
Publications
87,577
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
45,817
Citations
Additional affiliations
July 1997 - present
Publications
Publications (232)
Treatment effect estimates in regression discontinuity (RD) designs are often sensitive to the choice of bandwidth and polynomial order, the two important ingredients of widely used local regression methods. While Imbens and Kalyanaraman and Calonico, Cattaneo, and Titiunik provided guidance on bandwidth, the sensitivity to polynomial order still p...
We examine the changing relationship between unionization and wage inequality in Canada and the United States. Our study is motivated by profound recent changes in the composition of the unionized workforce. Historically, union jobs were concentrated among low‐skilled men in private sector industries. With the steady decline in private sector union...
We synthesize two related literatures on firm-level drivers of wage inequality. Studies of rent sharing that use matched worker-firm data find elasticities of wages with respect to value added per worker in the range of 0.05–0.15. Studies of wage determination with worker and firm fixed effects typically find that firm-specific premiums explain 20%...
A regression kink design (RKD or RK design) can be used to identify casual effects in settings where the regressor of interest is a kinked function of an assignment variable. In this chapter, we apply an RKD approach to study the effect of unemployment benefits on the duration of joblessness in Austria, and discuss implementation issues that may ar...
We consider nonparametric identification and estimation in a nonseparable model where a continuous regressor of interest is a known, deterministic, but kinked function of an observed assignment variable. We characterize a broad class of models in which a sharp "Regression Kink Design" (RKD or RK Design) identifies a readily interpretable treatment-...
There is growing evidence that firm-specific pay premiums are an important source of wage inequality. These premiums will
contribute to the gender wage gap if women are less likely to work at high-paying firms or if women negotiate (or are offered)
worse wage bargains with their employers than men. Using longitudinal data on the hourly wages of Por...
We provide new evidence on the effect of the unemployment insurance (UI) weekly benefit amount on unemployment insurance spells based on administrative data from the state of Missouri covering the period 2003-2013. Identification comes from a regression kink design that exploits the quasi-experimental variation around the kink in the UI benefit sch...
Over the past four decades the median length of the papers published in the “top five” economic journals has grown by nearly 300 percent. We study the effects of a page limit policy introduced by the American Economic Review (AER) in mid-2008 and subsequently adopted by the Journal of the European Economic Association (JEEA) in 2009. We find that t...
This article provides a selective overview of “what we know” about the successes and failure of active labor market programs (ALMPs). It begins with a brief overview of the history of these programs, focusing on the major federally-funded programs operated in the United States since the 1930s. It then discusses the various behavioral channels that...
We study the role of establishment-specific wage premiums in generating recent increases in West German wage inequality. Models with additive fixed effects for workers and establishments are fit into four subintervals spanning the period from 1985 to 2009. We show that these models provide a good approximation to the wage structure and can explain...
How has publishing in top economics journals changed since 1970? Using a data set that combines information on all articles published in the top-five journals from 1970 to 2012 with their Google Scholar citations, we identify nine key trends. First, annual submissions to the top-five journals nearly doubled from 1990 to 2012. Second, the total numb...
Academic journals set a variety of policies that affect the supply of new manuscripts. We study the impact of page limit policies adopted by the American Economic Review (AER) in 2008 and the Journal of the European Economic Association (JEEA) in 2009 in response to a substantial increase in the length of articles in economics. We focus the analysi...
We consider nonparametric identification and estimation in a nonseparable model where a continuous regressor of interest is a known, deterministic, but kinked function of an observed assignment variable. This design arises in many institutional settings where a policy variable (such as weekly unemployment benefits) is determined by an observed but...
We study the role of establishment-specific wage premiums in generating recent increases in West German wage inequality. Models
with additive fixed effects for workers and establishments are fit into four subintervals spanning the period from 1985 to
2009. We show that these models provide a good approximation to the wage structure and can explain...
This paper provides new evidence on the eects of cash-in-hand on household be- havior. Using sharp discontinuities in eligibility for severance pay and extended unem- ployment bene…ts in Austria, combined with data on over one-half million job losers, we reach three main …ndings: (1) a lump-sum severance payment equal to two months of wages lowers...
I investigate in this paper the cyclicality of partial equilibrium behavioral responses to unem-ployment insurance (UI) in the US. I use administrative data on the universe of unemployment spells in five states from 1976 to 1984, and identify the effect of both benefit level and po-tential duration in the regression kink (RK) design using kinks in...
Although military conscription was widespread during most of the past century, credible evidence on the effects of mandatory service is limited. We provide new evidence on the long-term effects of peacetime conscription, using longitudinal data for Portuguese men born in 1967. These men were inducted at a relatively late age (21), allowing us to us...
The guide outlines the main evaluation challenges associated with ALMP’s, and shows how to obtain rigorous impact estimates using two leading evaluation approaches. The most credible and straightforward evaluation method is a randomized design, in which a group of potential participants is randomly divided into a treatment and a control group. Rand...
Who pays the cost of the business cycle? Consumption fluctuates in the tails way more than in the middle of the distribution. Further, top and bottom of the distribution do not move with the middle and are negatively related to each other. Consumption responses to fiscal and financial shocks are quite heterogeneous as financial shocks only affect t...
Macroeconomic calibrations imply much larger labor supply elasticities than mi-croeconometric studies. The most well known explanation for this divergence is that indivisible labor generates extensive margin responses that are not captured in micro studies of hours choices. We evaluate whether existing calibrations of macro models are consistent wi...
Although the practice of military conscription was widespread during most of the past century, credible evidence on the effects of mandatory service is limited. Angrist (1990) showed that the Vietnam-era draft in the U.S. lowered the early-career wages of conscripts, a finding he attributed to the low value of military experience. More recent studi...
The modern definition of unemployment emerged in the late 1930s from research conducted at the Works Progress Administration and the Census Bureau. According to this definition, people who are not working but actively searching for work are counted as unemployed. This concept was first used in the Enumerative Check Census, a follow-up sample for th...
We classify all published field experiments in five top economics journals from 1975 to 2010 according to how closely the experimental design and analysis are linked to economic theory. We find that the vast majority of field experiments (68 percent) are Descriptive studies that lack any explicit model; 18 percent are Single Model studies that test...
We study social interactions in the risky behavior of best-friend pairs in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). Focusing on friends who had not yet initiated a particular behavior (sex, smoking, marijuana use, truancy) by the first wave of the survey, we estimate bivariate discrete choice models for their subsequent de...
We study the link between family violence and the emotional cues associated with wins and losses by professional football teams. We hypothesize that the risk of violence is affected by the “gain-loss” utility of game outcomes around a rationally expected reference point. Our empirical analysis uses police reports of violent incidents on Sundays dur...
We report the impacts of a job training program operated in the Dominican Republic. A random sample of applicants was selected to undergo training, and information was gathered 10–14 months after graduation. Unfortunately, people originally assigned to treatment who failed to show up were not included in the follow-up survey, potentially compromisi...
This article presents a meta-analysis of recent microeconometric evaluations of active labour market policies. We categorise 199 programme impacts from 97 studies conducted between 1995 and 2007. Job search assistance programmes yield relatively favourable programme impacts, whereas public sector employment programmes are less effective. Training p...
Although extensive research has compared Catholic and public high schools, little is known about Catholic primary schools. Using unique data for two cohorts of primary school students, I find that Catholic schooling does not have a significant effect on mathematics and reading test scores. These findings do not change when school level test scores...
We use a simple theoretical framework and a randomized manipulation of access to information on peers' wages to provide new evidence on the effects of relative pay on individual job satisfaction and job search intentions. A randomly chosen subset of employees of the University of California (UC) was informed about a new website listing the pay of U...
Does the presence of corporate headquarters in a city affect the incomes of local charities? To address this question we combine data on the head office locations of publicly traded U.S. firms with information on the receipts of local charitable organizations. Cities like Houston, San Jose, and San Francisco gained significant numbers of corporate...
We argue that the development and expansion of direct, secure access to administrative micro-data should be a top priority for the NSF. Administrative data offer much larger sample sizes and have far fewer problems with attrition, non-response, and measurement error than traditional survey data sources. Administrative data are therefore critical fo...
Rent-sharing by workers can reduce the incentives for investment if some of the returns to sunk capital are captured in higher
wages. We propose a simple measure of this “holdup” effect based on the size of the wage offset for firm-specific capital
accumulation. Using Social Security earnings records for workers in the Veneto region of Italy linked...
Economists are often puzzled by the stronger public opposition to immigration than trade, since the two policies have similar effects on wages. Unlike trade, however, immigration can alter the composition of the local population, imposing potential externalities on natives. While previous studies have addressed fiscal spillover effects, a broader c...
In the Self Sufficiency Project Applicant Experiment, new welfare entrants were informed that if they remained on public assistance for a year they would become eligible to receive a generous earnings subsidy offer. Those who satisfied the waiting period, and then left welfare and began working full time within the following year, were entitled to...
Based on investigation and analysis of the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) review process and reports, this panel concluded that: (1) WWC procedures and processes for identifying and extracting information from intervention studies are generally well documented and follow reasonable standards and practices for systematic reviews; and (2) WWC Interve...
Health insurance characteristics shift at age 65 as most people become eligible for Medicare. We measure the impacts of these
changes on patients who are admitted to hospitals through emergency departments for conditions with similar admission rates
on weekdays and weekends. The age profiles of admissions and comorbidities for these patients are sm...
Contrary to the original intention of no-fault workers’ compensation
laws, employers deny liability for a substantial fraction of on-thejob
injuries. We develop and estimate a simple structural model that
explains the high rate of litigation as a consequence of asymmetric
information. We estimate the model using data for a large sample of
back inju...
Immigration is often viewed as a proximate cause of the rising wage gap between highand
low-skilled workers. Nevertheless, there is controversy over the appropriate
theoretical and empirical framework for measuring the presumed effect, and over the
precise magnitudes involved. This paper offers an overview and synthesis of existing
knowledge on the...
The onset of Medicare eligibility at age 65 leads to sharp changes in the health insurance coverage of the U.S. population. These changes lead to increases in the use of medical services, with a pattern of gains across socioeconomic groups that varies by type of service. While routine doctor visits increase more for groups that previously lacked in...
We consider nonparametic identification of the average marginal effect of a continuous endogenous regressor in a generalized nonseparable model when the regressor of interest is a known, deterministic, but kiniked function of an observed continuous assignment variable. This design arises in many institutional settings where a policy variable of int...
This paper tests whether providing information about the work incentives created by the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) ampli…es its e¤ects on labor supply. We conducted a randomized …eld experiment with 43,000 EITC claimants at H&R Block in which half the clients were provided simple, personalized information about the EITC schedule. We obtain thr...
We show that immigrant managers are substantially more likely to hire immigrants than are native managers. The finding holds when comparing establishments in the same 5-digit industry and location, when comparing different establishments within the same firm, when analyzing establishments that change management over time, and when accounting for wi...
Schelling (“Dynamic Models of Segregation,” Journal of Mathematical Sociology 1 (1971), 143–186) showed that extreme segregation can arise from social interactions in white preferences: once the minority
share in a neighborhood exceeds a “tipping point,” all the whites leave. We use regression discontinuity methods and Census
tract data from 1970 t...
A large psychological literature suggests that individuals rely on comparative per-ception when making sequential decisions or assessments. Such a perceptual bias could inuence behavior in settings from employee hiring and medical diagnosis to investment appraisal and product evaluation. This study presents a theoretical framework which o¤ers predi...
Is there competition between publicly funded Catholic and public schools for students in Ontario? And, if so, does competition improve education quality?
Defined contribution pensions in many postsecondary institutions are funded by a combination of an employer premium and a mandatory employee premium. Individuals can also contribute to a supplemental savings account. Holding constant total compensation, standard reasoning suggests that supplemental savings should depend negatively on the sum of the...
In the past 25 years immigration has re-emerged as a driving force in the size and composition of U.S. cities. This paper describes the effects of immigration on overall population growth and the skill composition of cities, focusing on the connection between immigrant inflows and the relative number of less-skilled workers in the local population....
This paper summarizes the findings from the first randomized evaluation of a job training program in Latin America. Between 2001 and 2005 the government of the Dominican Republic operated a subsidized training program for low-income youth in urban areas. The program featured several weeks of classroom instruction followed by an internship at a priv...
Racial segregation is often blamed for some of the achievement gap between blacks and whites. We study the effects of school and neighborhood segregation on the relative SAT scores of black students across different metropolitan areas, using large microdata samples for the 1998–2001 test cohorts. Our models include detailed controls for the family...
This paper presents new tests of the permanent income hypothesis and other widely used models of household behavior using data from the labor market. We estimate the excess sensitivity of job search behavior to cash-on-hand using sharp discontinuities in eligibility for severance pay and extended unemployment insurance (UI) benefits in Austria. Ana...
Critics argue that electronic voting is vulnerable to fraud. We test whether voting technology affected electoral outcomes in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. We find a positive correlation between use of electronic voting and George Bush vote share. The effect could have been large enough to influence the final results in some swing state...
In this paper, we review the literature on the spike in unemployment exit rates around benefit exhaustion, and present new evidence based on administrative data for a large sample of job losers in Austria. We find that the way unemployment spells are measured has a large effect on the magnitude of the spike at exhaustion, both in existing studies a...
Measures of Active Labor Market Policy-such as training, wage subsidies, public employment measures, and job search assistance-are widely used in European countries to combat unemployment. Little, however, is known about what each country can learn from experiences in other countries. This study provides novel insight on this important policy issue...
In the SSP Applicant Experiment, a random sample of new welfare entrants was informed that if they remained on welfare for a year they would become eligible for a generous earnings subsidy. Those who satisfied the waiting period and then left welfare and began working full time within the following year were entitled to receive payments for up to 3...
A regression discontinuity (RD) research design is appropriate for program evaluation problems in which treatment status (or the probability of treatment) depends on whether an observed covariate exceeds a fixed threshold. In many applications the treatment-determining covariate is discrete. This makes it impossible to compare outcomes for observat...
In many European countries, sectoral bargaining agreements are automatically extended to cover all firms in an industry. Employers and employees can also negotiate firm-specific contracts. The authors of this paper use a large matched employer-employee data set from a 1995 survey in Spain to study the effects of firm-level contracting on the struct...
Despite the adoption of no-fault Workers' Compensation legislation in most states, there is substantial litigation over the issue of employer liability for injury claims. We develop a sequential asymmetric information model of liability disputes and estimate the model using data on injury claims from the state of Minnesota. The key insight of our m...
This paper constructs a model of saving for retired single people that includes heterogeneity in medical expenses and life expectancies, and bequest motives. We estimate the model using Assets and Health Dynamics of the Oldest Old data and the method of simulated moments. Out-of-pocket medical expenses rise quickly with age and permanent income. Th...
In the Self-Sufficiency Project (SSP) welfare demonstration, single parents who had been on public assistance for at least a year were offered a generous earnings subsidy if they left welfare and entered full-time work. A potential concern in generalizing the results of the experiment is that short-term welfare recipients might extend their welfare...
This paper reviews the recent evidence on U.S. immigration, focusing on two key questions:
(1) Does immigration reduce the labor market opportunities of less-skilled natives? (2) Have
immigrants who arrived after the 1965 Immigration Reform Act successfully assimilated?
Looking across major cities, differential immigrant inflows are strongly correl...
In the Self Sufficiency Project (SSP) welfare demonstration, members of a randomly assigned treatment group could receive a subsidy for full-time work. The subsidy was available for 3 years, but only to people who began working full time within 12 months of random assignment. A simple optimizing model suggests that the eligibility rules created an...
Between 1996 and 1998 California and Texas eliminated the use of affirmative action in college and university admissions. At the states' elite public universities admission rates of black and Hispanic students subsequently fell by 30-50% and minority representation in the entering freshman classes declined. This study investigates whether the elimi...
This paper summarizes early findings from a social experiment that provided financial incentives for new welfare recipients to leave welfare and work full time. The financial incentive was essentially a negative income tax with a requirement that people work at least 30 h/week. Early results show that the financial incentive increased full-time emp...
This paper uses the abrupt changes in health insurance coverage at age 65 arising from the Medicare program eligibility rules to evaluate the impact of insurance status on treatment intensity and health outcomes. Drawing from several million hospital discharge records for the State of California, the authors begin by identifying a subset of patient...
The relationship between technological change and the earnings of lessskilled workers is one of the oldest issues in economics (Berg 1984). 1 Renewed interest in the link was spawned by labor market trends in the 1980s, including the decline in real wages for younger and less-educated workers and the sharp increase in the wage gap between college-...
Mexican immigrants were historically clustered in a few cities, mainly in
California and Texas. During the past 15 years, however, arrivals from
Mexico established sizeable immigrant communities in many “new” cities.
We explore the causes and consequences of the widening geographic
diffusion of Mexican immigrants. A combination of demand-pull and
s...
Immigration control is an issue that figures prominently in public policy
discussions and election campaigns throughout Europe. Although
immigration may have positive effects on economic efficiency and growth
in the receiving economy, it is often the negative aspects −or perceived
negative aspects − of immigration that attract the most attention. I...
In Spain, as in several other European countries, sectoral bargaining agreements are automatically extended to cover all firms in an industry. Employers and employees can also negotiate firm-specific contracts. We use a large matched employer-employee data set to study the effects of firm-level contracting on the structure of wages. Employees cover...
We show that immigrant managers are substantially more likely to hire immigrants than are native managers. The finding holds when comparing establishments in the same 5-digit industry and location, when comparing different establishments within the same firm, when analyzing establishments that change management over time, and when accounting for wi...
This paper provides a survey on studies that analyze the macroeconomic effects of intellectual property rights (IPR). The first part of this paper introduces different patent policy instruments and reviews their effects on R&D and economic growth. This part also discusses the distortionary effects and distributional consequences of IPR protection a...
This article studies the accuracy of reported Medicaid coverage in the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) using administrative records from the State of California. Overall, we estimate that the SIPP underestimates Medicaid coverage in the California population by about 10%. The probability of correctly reporting coverage for those a...
Despite intensive scrutiny, the effects of Medicaid expansions on the health insurance status of low-income children remain controversial. We reexamine the effects of the two largest federally mandated expansions which offered Medicaid coverage to low-income children in specific age ranges and birth cohorts. We use a regression discontinuity approa...
We use the increases in health insurance coverage at age 65 generated by the rules of the Medicare program to evaluate the effects of health insurance coverage on health related behaviors and outcomes. The rise in overall coverage at age 65 is accompanied by a narrowing of disparities across race and education groups. Groups with bigger increases i...
This paper studies the accuracy of reported Medicaid coverage in the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) using a unique data set formed by matching SIPP survey responses to administrative records from the State of California. Overall, we estimate that the SIPP underestimates Medicaid coverage in the California population by about 10 p...
In the Self Sufficiency Program (SSP) welfare demonstration, members of a randomly assigned treatment group could receive a subsidy for full time work. The subsidy was available for three years, but only to people who began working full time within 12 months of random assignment. A simple optimizing model suggests that the eligibility rules created...