NBER Publications by Heather Royer

This paper attempts to isolate, document, and measure a social effect of incentivizing people in teams. In a field experiment featuring exogenous team formation and opportunities for repeated social interactions over time, we find social effects that are nearly as large as direct pecuniary effects: the team compensation system implemented in our paper induced agents to choose their effort as if they valued a marginal dollar of compensation for their teammate three-fourths as much as they value a dollar of their own compensation. We conclude that social effects of team incentives exist and can be decisive in motivating effort-intensive tasks.

Between 1973 and 2003, abortion providers in the United States were the targets of over 300 acts of extreme violence. Using unique data on attacks and on abortions, abortion providers, and births, we examine how anti-abortion violence has affected providers’ decisions to perform abortions and women’s decisions about whether and where to terminate a pregnancy. We find that clinic violence reduces abortion services in targeted areas. Once travel is taken into account, however, the overall effect of the violence is much smaller.

There is a strong, positive and well-documented correlation between education and health outcomes. There is much less evidence on the extent to which this correlation reflects the causal effect of education on health - the parameter of interest for policy. In this paper we attempt to overcome the difficulties associated with estimating the causal effect of education on health. Our approach exploits two changes to British compulsory schooling laws that generated sharp differences in educational attainment among individuals born just months apart. Using regression discontinuity methods, we confirm that the cohorts just affected by these changes completed significantly more education than slightly older cohorts subject to the old laws. However, we find little evidence that this additional edu...

This paper uses age-at-school-entry policies to identify the effect of female education on fertility and infant health. We focus on sharp contrasts in schooling, fertility, and infant health between women born just before and after the school entry date. School entry policies affect female education and the quality of a woman%u2019s mate and have generally small, but possibly heterogeneous, effects on fertility and infant health. We argue that school entry policies manipulate primarily the education of young women at risk of dropping out of school.