American Economic Review Vol. 105 No. 5 2015

Evaluating Econometric Evaluations of Post-Secondary Aid

Josh Angrist¹; David Autor¹; Sally Hudson²; Amanda Pallais³

¹ Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139 and NBER (e-mail: ) · ² Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139 (e-mail: ) · ³ Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138 and NBER (e-mail: )

Abstract

In an ongoing evaluation of post-secondary financial aid, we use random assignment to assess the causal effects of large privately-funded aid awards. Here, we compare the unbiased causal effect estimates from our RCT with two types of non-experimental econometric estimates. The first applies a selection-on-observables assumption in data from an earlier, nonrandomized cohort; the second uses a regression discontinuity design. Selection-on-observables methods generate estimates well below the experimental benchmark. Regression discontinuity estimates are similar to experimental estimates for students near the cutoff, but sensitive to controlling for the running variable, which is unusually coarse.

DOI

10.1257/aer.p20151025

Volume

105

Issue

5

Pages

502-507

Language

en

Sources

bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref

Cite

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