For many students throughout the world the time to obtain an academic degree extends beyond the normal completion time while college tuition is typically constant during the years of enrollment. In particular, it does not increase when a student remains in a program beyond the normal completion...

This paper examines how schools choose class size and how households sort in response to those choices. Focusing on the highly liberalized Chilean education market, we develop a model in which schools are heterogeneous in an underlying productivity parameter, class size is a component of school...

This paper uses administrative longitudinal micro data on Junior High school students in Uruguay to measure the effect of grade failure on students’ subsequent school outcomes. Exploiting the discontinuity induced by a rule establishing automatic grade failure for pupils with more than three...

We study the impact of employment quota on firms' demand for disabled workers. The Austrian Disabled Persons Employment Act (DPEA) requires firms to provide at least one job to a disabled worker per 25 non-disabled workers, a rule which is strictly enforced by non-compliance taxation. We find...

We estimate the impact of a large anti-poverty program - the Uruguayan PANES - on political support for the government that implemented it. The program mainly consisted of a monthly cash transfer for a period of roughly two and half years. Using the discontinuity in program assignment based on a...

We study the impact of local taxation on the location and growth of firms. Our empirical methodology pairs establishments across jurisdictional boundaries to estimate the impact of taxation. Our approach improves on existing work as it corrects for unobserved establishment heterogeneity, for...

We apply a regression discontinuity design to estimate the returns to being elected to parliament or to a municipal council. We present a bootstrap approach for measuring electoral closeness in any electoral system, and apply it to the Finnish proportional open list system. Getting elected to...

We investigate the role of national institutions on regional development in a novel framework. We exploit the fact that the arbitrary political boundaries in the eve of African independence partitioned more than two hundred ethnic groups across different countries subjecting similar cultures,...

We study the entrance in a retail market of consumers who are less elastic because of hurriedness and lack of information. Theory predicts that firms react by increasing prices to expand surplus extraction, but this effect weakens as market competition increases. High frequency data from Italian...