This paper uses data available from the National Opinion Research Center's (NORC) survey on religious attitudes and powerful statistical methods to evaluate the effect of prayer on the attitude of God toward human beings. -- Kernel estimator ; unobserved variables

This paper summarizes our recent research on evaluating the distributional consequences of social programs. This research advances the economic policy evaluation literature beyond estimating assorted mean impacts to estimate distributions of outcomes generated by different policies and determine...

In the model of Harris and Holmstrom (1982) workers pay an insurance premium to prevent a wage decline. As employers are unable to assess the ability of a labour market entrant, they would offer a wage equal to expected productivity of the worker's category and adjust it with unfolding...

This paper examines the performance of the JTPA performance system, a widely emulated model for inducing efficiency in government organizations. We present a model of how performance incentives may distort bureaucratic decisions. We define cream skimming within the model. Two major empirical...