I examine the effects of education on health in Indonesia using an exogenous variation in education induced by an extension of Indonesia's school term length in 1978-1979, a natural experiment that fits a regression discontinuity design. I find the longer school year increases educational...

In 1997, the French government put into effect a law that permanently exempted young French male citizens born after Jan 1, 1979 from mandatory military service while still requiring those born before that cutoff date to serve. This paper uses a regression discontinuity design to identify the...

An emerging body of literature examines the economic returns to quality of postsecondary education. This literature has predominantly focused on the returns to the most selective universities. However, less is known about the extent to which these gains are realized for the academically marginal...

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate a fiscal common-pool problem in a Japanese local government. Especially, we focus on the relationship between council size and land development expenditure of local government using a dataset of 13,989 municipalities in Japan from FY2001 to FY2006. We...

As South African universities experience extremely low graduation rates, academic staff implement a range of interventions, for instance tutorial programmes, in order to improve student performance. However, relatively little is known about the impact of such tutorial programmes on students’...

This paper examines whether education empowers women. We exploit an exogenous variation in education induced by a longer school year in Indonesia in 1978, which fits a fuzzy regression discontinuity design. We find education reduces the number of live births, increases contraceptive use, and...

This study explores the short-run spillover effects of popular research papers. We consider the publicity of 'Male Organ and Economic Growth: Does Size Matter?' as an exogenous shock to economics discussion paper demand, a natural experiment of a sort. In particular, we analyze how the very...

In order to evaluate a fiscal common-pool problem, this paper focuses on the relationship between local government council size and its expenditure. Generally, local councilors internalize the benefit of public projects targeted at their political jurisdictions, but underestimate and prefer to...

What determines the share of public employment, at a given size of the State, in countries of similar levels of economic development? While the theoretical and empirical literature on this issue has mostly considered technical dimensions (efficiency and political considerations), this paper...

This paper examines the effects of a longer school year in Indonesia on grade repetition, educational attainment, employability, and earnings. I exploit an arbitrary rule that assigned students to a longer school year in Indonesia in 1978-1979, which fits a fuzzy regression discontinuity design....