The Jobs-Plus Public Housing Revitalization Initiative (1998-2003) was designed to raise and sustain the employment and earnings of residents of public housing developments. It had three parts: (1) employment services offered at on-site job centers, (2) changes in rent rules that provided...

Family Rewards was an innovative approach to poverty reduction in the United States that was modelled on the conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs common in lower- and middle-income countries. The program offered cash assistance to poor families to reduce immediate hardship, provided they met...

This study uses meta-analysis to synthesize findings from 31 evaluations of 15 voluntary government-funded training programs for the disadvantaged that operated between 1964 and 1998. On average, the earnings effects of the evaluated programs seem to have been largest for women, quite modest for...

Books reviewed in this article: Masahisa Fujita and Jacques-Francois Thisse - Economics of Agglomeration: Cities, Industrial Location, and Regional Growth Timothy J. Bartik - Jobs for the Poor: Can Labor Policies Help? Miriam Solomon - Social Empiricism Nicole Pohl - Mobility in Space and Time:...

This paper reviews the use of multiple trials in evaluating social programs. We define multiple trials to include both conducting evaluations in multiple sites concurrently and replications, where the intervention is replicated in one or more sites after the initial evaluation. After defining...

Whose costs and benefits should count in cost-benefit analysis (CBA)? This is an important practical question requiring answers for analysts because most government agencies offer only permissive or vague guidance. Drawing primarily on foundational CBA principles, we present a conceptual...

The findings from most benefit-cost analyses (BCA) are subject to considerable uncertainty. In BCAs of social programs, much of this uncertainty arises from sampling error to which the impact estimates used in determining benefits and costs are subject. Such uncertainty in BCAs of social...