Research

The UN General Assembly recognises the right to equal treatment before the law as a universal human right. A minimum requirement to uphold this right is to guarantee access to a lawyer independently of one's income, and this is what legal aid does. While legal aid is necessary to reduce income-based inequality before the law, the extent to which this is achieved depends on the quality of its services. In a context where all defenders have access to a lawyer, I study the impact of refusing legal aid on court outcomes. This is a conservative estimate of the performance gap between privately- and publicly-funded legal services. I do this by taking a double machine learning approach to a new administrative dataset linking data from legal aid application forms to their court outcomes in New South Wales, Australia. Access to the legal aid application forms, which include all the factors used in the decision to provide aid, allows me to learn the unknown treatment assignment function and identify treatment effects via the random forests algorithm. I find that aid applicants who fail the means test and hire a private lawyer are 10 p.p. less likely to be incarcerated than if they passed it and relied on legal aid. With an average positive incarceration length is almost 4 years, this gap is consequential. Finally, I argue that this approach, combining high-quality administrative data with double machine learning, may allow policy-makers to track the performance of public programs that are hard to evaluate using standard econometric approaches.

Keywords: Indigent Defense, Crime, Criminal Justice.

JEL: I30, K14, H44.

We use whole-population linked administrative data from Australia to examine the economic and mental health impacts of IVF treatment and involuntary childlessness. Leveraging detailed information on fertility treatment, income, and prescription drug use, we implement a dynamic triple-difference framework comparing women who remain childless five years after initiating IVF to those who successfully conceive. Results reveal large and persistent effects on both mental health and income. We further show that the IVF process itself leads to income declines among childless women, underscoring substantial unmeasured costs and suggesting downward bias in child penalty estimates that use unsuccessful IVF patients as controls.

Keywords: Involuntary Childlessness, IVF, Mental health, Labor Market Outcomes, Fertility and Career Trade-offs

JEL: J13, J22, I14, I31, J16.

We study the impact of a novel COVID-19 vaccine mandate, targeting graduating high-school students, on first vaccine uptake. In 2021, the State Government of Western Australia (WA) required attendees at ``Leavers''—a large-scale state-supported graduation party held annually in November in a WA regional town—to be vaccinated.  Using administrative data link date-of-birth (at the month level), school enrolment, and first-dose vaccination records, we exploit the strict school-age laws in WA to run regression discontinuity design (RDDs). In other words, we leverage the date-of-birth cutoff for starting compulsory schooling in WA to build the counterfactual vaccination outcomes for Year-12 (i.e. graduating) students. We run both static and dynamic RDDs, the latter consisting of daily RDD estimations in a one-year window centred around the policy deadline in November 2021. We find that the ``Leavers mandate”—which excluded unvaccinated Year-12 students from the state's official graduation party—raised vaccination rates by 9.3 percentage points at the cutoff. The dynamic RDD estimates show that this effect is entirely due to pulling forward future vaccinations by 46-80 days, with no net increase in ultimate uptake. Our paper is first in disentangling ``pull-forward'' (intensive margin) versus ``net'' (extensive margin) effects of a vaccine mandate in a pandemic context—meaning that we identify how much the mandate made eventually-vaccinated people anticipate their vaccination, and how much it induced vaccinations that would not have happened absent the mandate. We also bring new evidence on the efficacy of time-limited non-monetary incentives for accelerating vaccination campaigns.

Keywords: mandate; vaccination; incentives; uptake; adolescents.

JEL: I12; I18.

There has been substantial public debate about the potentially deleterious effects of the long-run move to ``inquiry-based learning'' in which students are placed at the center of an educational journey and arrive at their own understanding of what is being taught. There have been numerous calls for a return to ``direct'' or ``explicit'' instruction. This paper focuses on identifying the causal effect of correctly implementing explicit instruction on student performance in standardized tests. We utilise a unique setting in Australia—a country in which all students in grades 3, 5, 7, and 9 undergo annual basic skills tests (``NAPLAN''). We use a synthetic control approach to study the effect of introducing Explicit Instruction in Charlestown South Public School—median-performing school—on Year-3 and Year-5 NAPLAN scores in Reading and Numeracy. Importantly, this is achieved via peer modelling, with Charlestown teaching staff sitting-in during the classes of a high-performing explicit-instruction school. We find that the performance gains are substantial and persistent. 

Keywords: Education, Explicit Instruction, Pedagogy. 

JEL: I20, I21.

Pregnancies conceived via assisted reproductive technology (ART) are considered high-risk. While ART-use correlates with predictors of poor obstetric outcomes, such as advanced maternal age, it remains unclear whether ART-use increases the risk of such outcomes. We address this identification issue by (i) comparing obstetric outcomes for ART-conceived births with spontaneously-conceived births after failed ART treatment, (ii) adjusting flexibly for key confounders using double machine learning. We do this using clinical registry ART data and administrative birth data from New South Wales (NSW) between 2009-2017, which include the outcome of the ART treatment and clinical information on mothers and babies. We find that ART slightly decreases the risk of obstetric interventions, lowering the risk of a caesarean section (-2.8 p.p.) and increasing the rate of spontaneous labour (+3.5 p.p.). This evidence is consistent with ART not exacerbating defensive medical behaviour, where physicians intervene more than necessary to reduce the risk of adverse medical outcomes and litigation. Moreover, we estimate that ART has a precise null effect on the risks of preterm spontaneous birth and preterm birth, on the gestational age at birth, birth weight and APGAR scores—evidence of ART not affecting the health of the baby in a clinically significant way.

Keywords: Fertility, Assisted reproduction, IVF, Obstetric outcomes, Infertility

JEL: I10, I12, I19.