We examine the effect of attending academically selective high schools on test scores, by leveraging administrative data that matches high school preferences of the population of urban middle school graduates in one Chinese prefecture in 2010 with high school student records. The standard...

This study examines the enduring spatial and racial dimensions of poverty and deprivation in South Africa to assess the progress made by the post-apartheid society and state. A multi-dimensional approach is required to assess progress because it can reflect the reduction in deprivation...

We analyze the impact of the quality of candidates running for a mayor position on turnout using a large data set on Italian municipal elections held from 1993 to 2011. We firstly estimate a municipal fixed effects model and show that an increase in the average quality of candidates competing at...

We use a Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD) to evaluate the impact of cost-sharing on the use of health services. In the Italian health system, individuals reaching age 65 and earning low incomes are given total exemption from cost-sharing for health services consumption. Since the...

A key concern in the design of education policies relates to the structure of incentives in accountability systems. This paper examines a school accountability program that provides financial support to low-performing schools but has no direct punishment scheme for recipients who do not exhibit...

This work studies the impact of accounting for intrahousehold inequality in the distribution of resources for the measurement of poverty. For the estimation of intrahousehold distribution of resources the study relies on collective Engel curves. For the poverty analysis, we propose a fuzzy...

This paper develops a novel wild bootstrap procedure to construct robust bias-corrected (RBC) valid confidence intervals (CIs) for fuzzy regression discontinuity designs, providing an intuitive complement to existing RBC methods. The CIs generated by this procedure are valid under conditions...

We study the impact that participation in the Erasmus program produces on a number of labor market outcomes. By implementing a Fuzzy Regression Discontinuity Design, we show that participating in the international mobility program positively affects the probability of being employed three years...

There is sparse evidence on the impact of health information on mental health as well as on the mechanisms governing this relationship. We estimate the causal impact of health information on mental health via the effect of a diabetes diagnosis on depression. We employ a fuzzy regression...