Urban peripheries in many developing countries lack basic local public goods like street pavement, water, sewerage and electricity. We design an experiment of street pavement provision in a Mexican urban area and estimate impacts on a set of indicators obtained from a household survey. Our...

This study examines the extent and influence of occupational licensing in the U.S. using a specially designed national labor force survey. Specifically, we provide new ways of measuring occupational licensing and consider what types of regulatory requirements and what level of government...

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...

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...

This paper provides an introduction and "user guide" to Regression Discontinuity (RD) designs for empirical researchers. It presents the basic theory behind the research design, details when RD is likely to be valid or invalid given economic incentives, explains why it is considered a...

Using administrative, longitudinal data on felony arrests in Florida, we exploit the doscontinous increase in the punitiveness of criminal sanctions at 18 to estimate the deterence effect of incarceration. Our analysis suggests a 2 percent decline in the logodds of offending at 18, with a...