IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/25503.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Effects of Photo ID Laws on Registration and Turnout: Evidence from Rhode Island

Author

Listed:
  • Francesco Maria Esposito
  • Diego Focanti
  • Justine S. Hastings

Abstract

We study the effect of photo ID laws on voting using a difference-in-differences estimation approach around Rhode Island’s implementation of a photo ID law. We employ anonymized administrative data to measure the law’s impact by comparing voting behavior among those with drivers’ licenses versus those without, before versus after the law. Turnout, registration, and voting conditional on registration fell for those without licenses after the law passed. We do not find evidence that people proactively obtained licenses in anticipation of the law, nor do we find that they substituted towards mail ballots which do not require a photo ID.

Suggested Citation

  • Francesco Maria Esposito & Diego Focanti & Justine S. Hastings, 2019. "Effects of Photo ID Laws on Registration and Turnout: Evidence from Rhode Island," NBER Working Papers 25503, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:25503
    Note: LE PE POL
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w25503.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Cobb, Rachael V. & Greiner, D. James & Quinn, Kevin M., 2012. "Can Voter ID Laws Be Administered in a Race-Neutral Manner? Evidence from the City of Boston in 2008," Quarterly Journal of Political Science, now publishers, vol. 7(1), pages 1-33, March.
    2. Guido W. Imbens, 2004. "Nonparametric Estimation of Average Treatment Effects Under Exogeneity: A Review," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 86(1), pages 4-29, February.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Billings, Stephen B. & Braun, Noah & Jones, Daniel & Shi, Ying, 2022. "Disparate Racial Impacts of Shelby County v. Holder on Voter Turnout," IZA Discussion Papers 15829, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. van de Walle, Dominique & Mu, Ren, 2007. "Fungibility and the flypaper effect of project aid: Micro-evidence for Vietnam," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 84(2), pages 667-685, November.
    2. Lechner, Michael, 2018. "Modified Causal Forests for Estimating Heterogeneous Causal Effects," IZA Discussion Papers 12040, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    3. Alexandre Belloni & Victor Chernozhukov & Denis Chetverikov & Christian Hansen & Kengo Kato, 2018. "High-dimensional econometrics and regularized GMM," CeMMAP working papers CWP35/18, Centre for Microdata Methods and Practice, Institute for Fiscal Studies.
    4. Turner, Alex J. & Fichera, Eleonora & Sutton, Matt, 2021. "The effects of in-utero exposure to influenza on mental health and mortality risk throughout the life-course," Economics & Human Biology, Elsevier, vol. 43(C).
    5. Roxana Elena Manea, 2021. "School Feeding Programmes, Education and Food Security in Rural Malawi," CIES Research Paper series 63-2020, Centre for International Environmental Studies, The Graduate Institute.
    6. Dettmann, E. & Becker, C. & Schmeißer, C., 2011. "Distance functions for matching in small samples," Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 55(5), pages 1942-1960, May.
    7. José de Sousa & Guillaume Hollard, 2021. "From Micro to Macro Gender Differences: Evidence from Field Tournaments," Post-Print hal-03389151, HAL.
    8. repec:ags:jrapmc:122316 is not listed on IDEAS
    9. Gunther Bensch & Jörg Peters, 2013. "Alleviating Deforestation Pressures? Impacts of Improved Stove Dissemination on Charcoal Consumption in Urban Senegal," Land Economics, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 89(4), pages 676-698.
    10. G. Miller & Yuriy Pylypchuk, 2014. "Marital Status, Spousal Characteristics, and the Use of Preventive Care," Journal of Family and Economic Issues, Springer, vol. 35(3), pages 323-338, September.
    11. Kitagawa, Toru & Muris, Chris, 2016. "Model averaging in semiparametric estimation of treatment effects," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 193(1), pages 271-289.
    12. Michael Lechner & Ruth Miquel & Conny Wunsch, 2011. "Long‐Run Effects Of Public Sector Sponsored Training In West Germany," Journal of the European Economic Association, European Economic Association, vol. 9(4), pages 742-784, August.
    13. Li, Linjie & Liu, Xiaming & Yuan, Dong & Yu, Miaojie, 2017. "Does outward FDI generate higher productivity for emerging economy MNEs? – Micro-level evidence from Chinese manufacturing firms," International Business Review, Elsevier, vol. 26(5), pages 839-854.
    14. Olivier Dagnelie & Philippe Lemay‐Boucher, 2012. "Rosca Participation in Benin: A Commitment Issue," Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Department of Economics, University of Oxford, vol. 74(2), pages 235-252, April.
    15. Frölich, Markus & Lechner, Michael, 2010. "Exploiting Regional Treatment Intensity for the Evaluation of Labor Market Policies," Journal of the American Statistical Association, American Statistical Association, vol. 105(491), pages 1014-1029.
    16. Ralf Becker & Maggy Fostier, 2015. "Evaluating non-compulsory educational interventions - the case of peer assisted study groups," Economics Discussion Paper Series 1509, Economics, The University of Manchester.
    17. Katie Meara & Francesco Pastore & Allan Webster, 2020. "The gender pay gap in the USA: a matching study," Journal of Population Economics, Springer;European Society for Population Economics, vol. 33(1), pages 271-305, January.
    18. Ronald Mincy & Jennifer Hill & Marilyn Sinkewicz, 2009. "Marriage: Cause or mere indicator of future earnings growth?," Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 28(3), pages 417-439.
    19. Lou, Jiehong & Shen, Xingchi & Niemeier, Deb, 2020. "Are stay-at-home orders more difficult to follow for low-income groups?," Journal of Transport Geography, Elsevier, vol. 89(C).
    20. Gernandt, Johannes & Maier, Michael & Pfeiffer, Friedhelm & Rat-Wirtzler, Julie, 2006. "Distributional effects of the high school degree in Germany," ZEW Discussion Papers 06-088, ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research.
    21. Grau, Nicolas & Hojman, Daniel & Mizala, Alejandra, 2018. "School closure and educational attainment: Evidence from a market-based system," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 65(C), pages 1-17.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
    • K16 - Law and Economics - - Basic Areas of Law - - - Election Law
    • P16 - Political Economy and Comparative Economic Systems - - Capitalist Economies - - - Capitalist Institutions; Welfare State

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:25503. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.