Single-firm event studies play an important role in both scholarship and litigation despite the general invalidity of standard inference. We use a broad cross-section of 2000--2007 CRSP data and find that the standard approach performs poorly in terms of both Type I and Type II error rates. We...

In LDCs, policymakers sometimes cannot observe income among the poor. One oft-proposed approach to redistribution is indicator targeting: targeting transfers on corrrelations between income and “indicators” like geography, gender, or occupation. We build a simple model in which maximizing...

In this chapter I discuss the history and basic incentive effects of two key U.S. cash assistance programs aimed at families with children. Starting roughly in the 1980s, critics of the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program argued that the program -- designed largely to cut...

In the social sciences, “data mining” sometimes refers pejoratively to the repetitive use of classical statistical methods to find “evidence” that results from only random variation. Various aspects of evidence and civil-procedure law disincentivize data mining by expert witnesses in...

Welfare eligibility has traditionally required presence of a minor child in the household. Welfare migration incentives should thus be stronger among mothers of young children than among mothers of older children. Moreover, once migration has occurred, it is less likely to occur in the future,...