Decentralizing Schools

Synthetic control methods hold the promise of identifying a credible counterfactual by closely reproducing pretreatment outcome paths. Their reliability, however, depends in part on how effectively they constrain researchers’ less-visible degrees of freedom. We explore these methods’ sensitivity by constructing 1440 plausibly defensible specifications to estimate the employment effect of California’s $20 fast-food minimum wage. While over 96 percent of the estimated employment effects are negative, the range is vast, illustrating that synthetic control methods are sensitive to specification choice.

Historian Natalie Livingstone joins Andrew Roberts to uncover the overlooked stories of the women at the Nuremberg trials.

Waste, fraud, and abuse of public funds are among the oldest and most persistent issues in American history.