Policy researchers often have to estimate the future effect of imposing a policy in a particular location. There is often historical information on the effects of similar policies in other jurisdictions, but no information on the effects of the policy in the jurisdiction in question, and the...

Assessing the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is essential for policymakers, but challenging because the crisis has unfolded with extreme speed. We identify three indicators – stock market volatility, newspaper-based economic uncertainty, and subjective uncertainty in business...

I discuss the econometrics and the economics of past research on the effects of minimum wages on employment in the United States. My intent is to try to identify key questions raised in the recent literature, and some from the earlier literature, which I think hold the most promise for...

Place-based policies commonly target underperforming areas, such as deteriorating downtown business districts and disadvantaged regions. Principal examples include enterprise zones, European Union Structural Funds, and industrial cluster policies. Place-based policies are rationalized by various...

We collect data on operations, targets and human resources management practices in over 1,800 schools educating 15-year-olds in eight countries. Overall, we show that higher management quality is strongly associated with better educational outcomes. The UK, Sweden, Canada and the US obtain the...

Living wage campaigns have succeeded in about 100 jurisdictions in the United States but have also been unsuccessful in numerous cities. These unsuccessful campaigns provide a better control group or counterfactual for estimating the effects of living wage laws than the broader set of all cities...

Productivity is a key determinant of the sustainability of the public finances. While the initial impact of Covid-19 on labor productivity growth shows a surprisingly positive impact, the impact on total factor productivity (TFP) is less clear. We evaluate this with new survey data on labor and...

This paper presents evidence on the employment effects of recent minimum wage increases from a pre-specified research design that entailed committing to a detailed set of statistical analyses prior to 'going to' the data. Despite the limited data to which the pre-specified research design can be...

A critical impediment to research on school-to-work programs has been the absence of large representative data sets with information on such programs. In contrast, the new NLSY (NLSY97) offers researchers opportunities to analyze direct evidence on school-to-work programs. In the NLSY97,...

We use survey data on an opt-in panel of around 2,500 US small businesses to assess the impact of COVID-19. We find a significant negative sales impact that peaked in Quarter 2 of 2020, with an average loss of 29% in sales. The large negative impact masks significant heterogeneity, with over 40%...