We assess the role of measurement error in minimum wage evaluations when the treatment variable - the bite - is inferred from a survey wage distribution. We conduct Monte Carlo experiments on both simulated and empirical distributions of measurement error derived from a record linkage of survey...

The estimation of the economic return to education has perhaps been one of the predominant areas of analysis in applied economics for over 50 years. In this short note we consider some of the recent directions taken by the literature, and also some of the blockages faced by both science and...

We highlight the importance of randomisation bias, a situation where the process of participation in a social experiment has been affected by randomisation per se. We illustrate how this has happened in the case of the UK Employment Retention and Advancement (ERA) experiment, in which over one...

One of the most powerful critiques of the use of randomised experiments in the social sciences is the possibility that individuals might react to the randomisation itself, thereby rendering the causal inference from the experiment irrelevant for policy purposes. In this paper we set out a...

The estimation of the economic return to education has perhaps been one of the predominant areas of analysis in applied economics for over 50 years. In this short note we consider some of the recent directions taken by the literature, and also some of the blockages faced by both science and...

This note adds to the discussion originating from David Card and Alan B. Krueger (1994; CK) and David Neumark and William Wascher (2000; NW). It re-evaluates their results by using the semiparametric difference-in-differences estimator introduced by Alberto Abadie (2005). The re-evaluation suggests that...

We present a theorem helpful in estimating the mean and variance of a linear function with arbitrary multivariate randomness in its coefficients and variables. We derive a generalized decomposition result from two random linear functions in which the result can be applied to most models using...

This research aims to show the direct and indirect effects of size on the performance of the municipalities of Santa Catarina, due to the academic discussion about the size of the municipality affecting its performance. All municipalities in the state of Santa Catarina, from 2005 to 2016, were...

Some interventions or population attributes negate the effects of a treatment. This paper shows that incorporating these, what we call antidotal variables (AV), into a causal treatment effects analysis can with one cross-sectional regression identify the true causal effect, in addition to...

We propose a first order bias correction term for the Gini index to reduce the bias due to grouping. The first order correction term is obtained from studying the estimator of the Gini index within a measurement error framework. In addition, it reveals an intuitive formula for the remaining...