For individuals who experience job loss, enrollment in post-secondary programs may provide an opportunity to improve future employment outcomes. However, decisions to enroll may be hampered by insufficient information about the benefits and costs and the necessary steps and assistance available...

We quantify the importance of non-monetary news in central bank communication. Using evidence from four major central banks and a comprehensive classification of events, we decompose news conveyed by central banks into news about monetary policy, economic growth, and separately, shocks to risk...

This paper evaluates the impact of tapering “news” announcements by Fed senior policy makers on financial markets in emerging economies. We apply a panel framework using daily data, and find that emerging market asset prices respond most to statements by Fed Chairman Bernanke, and much less...

Can one-time informational interventions cause permanent changes in benefit take-up? In the context the Earned Income Tax Credit, we find evidence that reminding individuals of their eligibility has meaningful effects. Reminder notices have the largest effect among taxpayers without kids,...

We conducted a field experiment in 165 high-poverty New York City middle schools to help students navigate a complex high school choice process and access higher-performing schools. Students in treatment schools were given a customized one-page list of proximate high schools with a graduation...

In this paper, we investigate viewer responses to changes in the ideological content of television programming using variation induced by cadenas, unannounced takeovers of the public television airwaves by the government in Venezuela. Using high-frequency ratings data, we find that, consistent...

This chapter considers means-tested employment and training programs in the United States. We focus in particular on large, means-tested federal programs, including the Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA), its successor the Workforce Investment Act (WIA), that program's recent replacement, the...

This paper reports the results of an experimental evaluation of Evidence Based Literacy Instruction (EBLI). Developed over 15 years ago, EBLI aims to provide teachers with instructional strategies to improve reading accuracy, fluency and comprehension. Sixty-three teachers in grades 2-5 in seven...

To estimate the local effect of establishing land grant colleges, I compare locations that receive a land grant college to “runner-up” counties that were in contention to receive the land grant but did not for as-good-as-random reasons. I find that establishing a land grant college causes an...

The recent literature on evaluating manpower training programs demonstrates that alternative nonexperimental estimators of the same program produce a array of estimates of program impact. These findings have led to the call for experiments to be used to perform credible program evaluations....