When scale and replication work: Learning from summer youth employment experiments

Sara B. Heller

Journal of Public Economics, 2022, vol. 209, issue C

Abstract: This paper combines two new summer youth employment experiments in Chicago and Philadelphia with previously published evidence to show how repeated study of an intervention as it scales and changes contexts can guide decisions about public investment. Two sources of treatment heterogeneity can undermine the scale-up and replication of successful human capital interventions: variation in the treatment itself and in individual responsiveness. Results show that these programs generate consistently large proportional decreases in criminal justice involvement, even as administrators recruit additional youth, hire new local providers, find more job placements, and vary the content of their programs. Using both endogeneous stratification within cities and variation in 62 new and existing point estimates across cities uncovers a key pattern of individual responsiveness: impacts grow linearly with the risk of socially costly behavior each person faces. Identifying more interventions that combine this pattern of robustness to treatment variation with bigger effects for the most disconnected could aid efforts to reduce social inequality efficiently.

Keywords: Summer youth employment; Treatment heterogeneity; Replication; Scale; Crime prevention (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047272722000196
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:pubeco:v:209:y:2022:i:c:s0047272722000196

DOI: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2022.104617

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Public Economics is currently edited by R. Boadway and J. Poterba

More articles in Journal of Public Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().