We examine how a key provision of the Affordable Care Act – the expansion of Medicaid eligibility – affected health insurance coverage, access to care, and labor market transitions of unemployed workers. Comparing trends in states that implemented the Medicaid expansion to those that did...

With periodic recessions and the rising costs of health care, it is important to know how labor market participation and insecurity affects health outcomes. Yet, this line of research faces a number of methodological challenges which this paper aims to address. We turn to Ukraine's experience...

Knowledge of treatment effect heterogeneity or "essential heterogeneity" plays an important role in our understanding of how programs work and in the design of systems to allocate them among the eligible. This paper provides a relatively non-technical survey of the current state of the treatment...

Quantitative school performance measures (QPMs) are playing an ever larger role in education systems on both sides of the Atlantic. In this paper we outline the rationale for the use of such measures in education, review the literature relating to several important problems associated with their...

We study the job training provided under the US Workforce Investment Act (WIA) to adults and dislocated workers in two states. Our substantive contributions center on impacts estimated non-experimentally using administrative data. These impacts compare WIA participants who do and do not receive...

The "common effect" model in program evaluation assumes that all treated individuals have the same impact from a program. Our paper contributes to the recent literature that tests and goes beyond the common effect model by investigating impact heterogeneity using data from the experimental...

This paper evaluates the UK New Deal for Lone Parents (NDLP) program, which aims to return lone parents to work. Using rich administrative data on benefit receipt histories and a "selection on observed variables" identification strategy, we find that the program modestly reduces benefit receipt...

We provide simple tests for selection on unobserved variables in the Vytlacil-Imbens-Angrist framework for Local Average Treatment Effects. The tests allow researchers not only to test for selection on either or both of the treated and untreated outcomes, but also to assess the magnitude of the...

Estimation, inference and interpretation of the causal effects of programs and policies have all advanced dramatically over the past 25 years. We highlight three particularly important intellectual trends: an improved appreciation of the substantive importance of heterogeneous responses and of...

We present experimental evidence on the effects of four U.S. reemployment programs for youth Unemployment Insurance (UI) recipients during the Great Recession. The three programs that emphasized monitoring and service referrals reduced UI receipt but had minimal effects on employment and...