When Scale and Replication Work: Learning from Summer Youth Employment Experiments

Sara Heller

No 28705, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Because successful human capital interventions often fail to scale or replicate, public investment decisions require understanding how program size, context, and implementation shape program effects. This paper uses two new randomized controlled trials of summer youth employment programs in Chicago and Philadelphia to demonstrate how multiple experiments can help explain replicability and inform the expansion of promising approaches. Even when these programs grow or change models across contexts, participation consistently reduces criminal justice involvement. It may also decrease the need for child protective services and behavioral health treatment. Experimental variation in program model and local provider generates no detectable heterogeneity, suggesting that effects replicate partly because variability in implementation does not matter. There is, however, individual-level heterogeneity that explains differences in effect magnitudes across populations and informs optimal targeting; youth at higher risk of socially costly outcomes experience larger benefits. Identifying more interventions that combine this pattern of treatment heterogeneity with robust replicability could aid efforts to reduce social inequality efficiently.

JEL-codes: I38 J08 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-lab and nep-ure
Note: CH LS
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published as Sara B. Heller, 2022. "When scale and replication work: Learning from summer youth employment experiments," Journal of Public Economics, vol 209.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w28705.pdf (application/pdf)

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:nbr:nberwo:28705

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w28705

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().