Andres Mira, Ph.D. student in the Economics Department, won the “Mark Berger Best Paper Award” at the Annual Conference of the Kentucky Economic Association that occurred this month. The award goes to the best paper submitted to the conference. The paper is titled, “Estimating the Average treatment-on-the-treated effects of the DACA Program.”

Abstract:  Mira examined the labor market response of undocumented youth that participated in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). DACA provides temporary work authorization and deferral from deportation to eligible undocumented youth. He used data from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to construct a probabilistic measure for the unobserved DACA participation. Using ACS data, he estimated a two-sample model of the effect of participating in the DACA program. He also estimateed the spillover effects of DACA on eligible but non-participating undocumented youth. He found that DACA significantly improved labor market outcomes of DACA recipients, with magnitude of the treatment-on-the-treated effects at least twice as large as the intent-to-treat estimates obtained from using only the observed eligibility indicator. He also found an increase in school attendance among DACA recipients. Evidence of a negative spillover effect on eligible non-participants is documented with a decrease in labor force participation and school attendance.