Macroeconomic calibrations imply much larger labor supply elasticities than microeconometric studies. One prominent explanation for this divergence is that indivisible labor generates extensive margin responses that are not captured in micro studies of hours choices. We evaluate whether existing...

We present quasi-experimental evidence on the effects of increasing the Early Retirement Age (ERA) on older workers' retirement decisions. The analysis is based on social security reforms in Austria in 2000 and 2004, and administrative data allows us to distinguish between pension claims and job...

Each year, the United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS) sends notices to selected taxpayers who claim Earned Income Tax credit (EITC) benefits to request additional documentation to verify those claims. This paper uses administrative tax data to examine the impacts of these correspondence...

This paper uses administrative tax data to examine the long-term effects of an experimental job-search assistance program operating in Nevada in 2009. The program required randomly-selected unemployed workers who had just started collecting unemployment insurance (UI) benefits to undergo an...

This project examines how reminders affect tax filing among lower-income nonfilers (individuals who did not appear on a filed tax return but had income reported by third parties to the Internal Revenue Service). We present novel data on this population and results from two randomized controlled...

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 estimate causal effects of cash-on-hand on college enrollment decisions of students from low-income families. Using population-level, administrative data from United States income tax returns, we exploit variation in tax refunds received in the spring of the high school senior year. The...

Treatment effect estimates in regression discontinuity (RD) designs are often sensitive to the choice of bandwidth and polynomial order, the two important ingredients of widely used local regression methods. While Imbens and Kalyanaraman (2012) and Calonico, Cattaneo and Titiunik (2014) provide...

This paper presents a meta-analysis of recent microeconometric evaluations of active labor market policies. Our sample contains 199 separate "program estimates" - estimates of the impact of a particular program on a specific subgroup of participants - drawn from 97 studies conducted between 1995...

In this paper, we review the literature on the "spike" in unemployment exit rates around benefit exhaustion, and present new evidence based on administrative data for a large sample of job losers in Austria. We find that the way unemployment spells are measured has a large effect on the...