Social Experiments in the Labor Market

Jesse Rothstein and Till von Wachter

Department of Economics, Working Paper Series from Department of Economics, Institute for Business and Economic Research, UC Berkeley

Abstract: Large-scale social experiments were pioneered in labor economics, and are the basis for much of what we know about topics ranging from the effect of job training to incentives for job search to labor supply responses to taxation. Random assignment has provided a powerful solution to selection problems that bedevil nonexperimental research. Nevertheless, many important questions about these topics require going beyond random assignment. This applies to questions pertaining to both internal and external validity, and includes effects on endogenously observed outcomes, such as wages and hours; spillover effects; site effects; heterogeneity in treatment effects; multiple and hidden treatments; and the mechanisms producing treatment effects. In this Chapter, we review the value and limitations of randomized social experiments in the labor market, with an emphasis on these design issues and approaches to addressing them. These approaches expand the range of questions that can be answered using experiments by combining experimental variation with econometric or theoretical assumptions. We also discuss efforts to build the means of answering these types of questions into the ex ante design of experiments. Our discussion yields an overview of the expanding toolkit available to experimental researchers.

Keywords: Social and Behavioral Sciences; Labor market; social experiments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-07-01
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Social Experiments in the Labor Market (2016)
Working Paper: Social Experiments in the Labor Market (2016)
Working Paper: Social Experiments in the Labor Market (2016)
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