Wage subsidies to private employers have often been proposed by economists as a potentially flexible and efficient method to improve the earnings and employment of low-wage workers. This paper lays out the basic economics of wage subsidies; examines issues arising in the design of alternative...

Most randomized controlled trials (RCT) of social programs test interventions at modest scale. While the hope is that promising programs will be scaled up, we have few successful examples of this scale-up process in practice. Ideally we would like to know which programs will work at large scale...

There is growing concern about "algorithmic bias" - that predictive algorithms used in decision-making might bake in or exacerbate discrimination in society. When will these "biases" arise? What should be done about them? We argue that such questions are naturally answered using the tools of...