Through the Hartz reforms, German active labour market policy was fundamentally restructured and has since been systematically evaluated. This paper reviews the recent evaluation findings and draws some conclusions for the future setup of active labour market policies in Germany. It argues in...

We conduct the first systematic evaluation of the world’s largest community-based development program--China’s flagship poverty alleviation program began in 2001 which finances public investments in designated poor villages based on participatory village planning. We use matching methods and...

Evaluations of new infrastructure in developing countries typically focus on direct effects, such as the impact of an electrifification program on household energy use. But if new infrastructure induces people to move into an area, other local publicly provided goods may become congested,...

Evaluating the impact of transport infrastructure meets a major challenge since rail lines are not randomly located. We use the natural experiment offered by the opening and progressive extension of the Regional Express Rail (RER) between 1970 and 2000 in the Paris metropolitan region, and in...

The construction of large dams is one of the most costly and controversial forms of public infrastructure investment in developing countries, but little is known about their impact. This paper studies the productivity and distributional effects of large dams in India. To account for endogenous...

This paper systematically examines the role of fiscal policy, trade and energy taxes on environmental quality in Europe using disaggregated data for 12 European countries over the 1995-2008 period. It uses a methodology that obtains estimates mostly free of time-varying omitted variable biases....

In this paper we use data on five social inclusion indicators (poverty, inequality, unemployment, education and health) to assess and compare the performance of 27 European welfare states (EU27) in 2008. Aggregate measures of performance are obtained using index number methods similar to those...

Does fiscal consolidation lead to social unrest? Using cross-country evidence for the period 1919 to 2008, we examine the extent to which societies become unstable after budget cuts. The results show a clear correlation between fiscal retrenchment and instability. We test if the relationship...

Evidence on the price elasticity of private donations to charities and on the crowding out effect of donations by government grants suggests that a redirection of government funds from tax incentives for giving towards direct grants could increase total charity funding. This raises the question...

This paper investigates the effect of ethnolinguistic conflict on redistribution. The analysis focuses on the conflict arising between ‘peripheral’ minority groups and a dominant ‘centre’. We propose an index of linguistic conflict that (i) encompasses both diversity and polarization,...