We analyse the initial impact of a major school admission reform in Brighton and Hove. The new system incorporated a lottery for oversubscribed places and new catchment areas. We examine the post‐reform changes in school composition. We locate the major winners and losers in terms of the quality of school attended. We match similar cities and conduct a difference‐in‐difference analysis of the p...

Does Manager Turnover Improve Firm Performance? New Evidence Using Information from Dutch Soccer, 1986-2004 This research examines the impact of manager turnover on firm performance using information from the Dutch soccer league in the period 1986-2004. The advantage of using sports data is that both manager characteristics and decisions and firm outcomes are directly observable. Both differenc...

By the widely used difference-in-difference method, the Southwest China Poverty Reduction Project had little impact on the proportion of people in beneficiary villages consuming less than $1/day — despite a public outlay of $400 million. Is that right, or is the true impact being hidden somehow? We find that impact estimates are quite sensitive to the choice of outcome indicator, the poverty li...

Apart from altruistic reasons, NGOs may engage in developing countries under conditions of conflict and war in order to secure funding and survive in the ‘market’ of humanitarian relief and development assistance. Applying a difference-in-difference-in-differences approach, we analyze empirically whether the presence of US-based NGOs in Afghanistan and Iraq improved their chances of external fu...

OBJECTIVE To examine absolute socio-economic differences in food habits and their changes over time. DESIGN A longitudinal study using the cohort baseline mail surveys conducted in 2000-2002 (n 8960, response rate 67 %) and the follow-up in 2007 (n 7332, response rate 83 %), including data on seven food habits recommended in the national dietary guidelines, as well as socio-economic and socio...

Does option-based compensation have a causal influence on payout policy? To address this question we examine the adoption of mandatory expensing of stock options (via accounting standard FAS123R), a plausible exogenous shock to the use of option-based compensation. As FAS123R applies to all firms, our identification strategy exploits the fact that the reduction in option-based compensation in r...

In 1995 a group of 1724 randomly selected Minnesota taxpayers was informed by letter that the returns they were about to file would be ‘closely examined’. Compared to a control group that did not receive this letter, low and middle-income taxpayers in the treatment group on average increased tax payments compared to the previous year, which we interpret as indicating the presence of noncomplian...

This paper investigates how IT-enabled monitoring systems mitigate moral hazard in an online labor market and their effect on market competition. We exploit a quasi-experiment at Freelancer when it introduced an IT-enabled monitoring system in 2015. We use a difference-in-differences (DID) approach to identify the treatment effect of the monitoring system on employer contractor choice, market c...

Newspapers’ advertising revenues have declined sharply in recent decades. We build a model to investigate the consequences on newspapers’ pricing and quality choices of a reduction in advertisers’ willingness to pay for readers’ attention. In our model, selling subscriptions in addition to newsstand issues allows to price discriminate between readers. We show that lower advertising revenues dec...

We study the causal effects of digitizing work on information workers’ time-use and performance at a large insurance firm. We make causal inferences and obtain unbiased estimates by exploiting a quasi-experiment: the phased introduction of Electronic Document Management (EDM) across multiple offices at different dates. We apply a difference-in-differences methodology to econometrically measure ...