Staggered adoption of policies by different units at different times creates promising opportunities for observational causal inference. Estimation remains challenging, however, and common regression methods can give misleading results. A promising alternative is the synthetic control method (SCM), which finds a weighted average of control units…

This study used data from 1994 to 1999 from one large county in Pennsylvania to estimate the Medicaid expenditures of children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and to compare these expenditures with those of other Medicaid-eligible children. On average, children diagnosed with ASD had expenditures 10 times those of other children.…

Both business leaders and parents pressure policymakers to legislate new initiatives to improve schools. One improvement strategy has been to reduce class sizes; another has been to allocate larger school budgets. This paper presents findings of a study that examined the relationship between class size and student achievement and between…