This chapter provides a selective review of some contemporary approaches to program evaluation. One motivation for our review is the recent emergence and increasing use of a particular kind of "program" in applied microeconomic research, the so-called Regression Discontinuity (RD) Design of...

This chapter provides a selective review of some contemporary approaches to program evaluation. One motivation for our review is the recent emergence and increasing use of a particular kind of “program” in applied microeconomic research, the so-called Regression Discontinuity (RD) Design of...

Economic impacts of unionization on employers are difficult to estimate in the absence of large, representative data on establishments with union status information. Estimates are also confounded by selection bias, because unions could organize at highly profitable enterprises that are more...

We examine the relationship between the employment and compensation of managers and CEOs and the presence of a unionized workforce. We develop a simple efficiency wage model, with a tradeoff between higher wages for workers and more monitoring, which requires more managers. The model also...

We find prejudices in favor of theory, as far back as there is institutionalized science. Plato and Aristotle frequented the Academy at Athens. That building is located on one side of the Agora, or market place. It is almost as far as possible from the Herculaneum, the temple to the goddess of...

We examine the effects of the most durable employer health insurance mandate in the United States, Hawaii's Prepaid Health Care Act, using Current Population Survey data covering the years 1979 to 2005. Relying on a variation of the classical Fisher permutation test applied across states, we...

We use a regression discontinuity design to analyze an understudied aspect of school accountability systems—how schools use financial rewards. For two years, California's accountability system financially rewarded schools based on a deterministic function of test scores. Qualifying schools...

This paper examines the determinants of hours worked when employment relationships are influenced by risk-sharing considerations. The environment considered is an extension of the standard symmetric-information risk-sharing model that allows for the possibility of enforcement problems on the...