While high rates of youth unemployment are a severe problem in most European countries, the program evaluation literature shows that disadvantaged youths constitute a group that is particularly difficult to assist effectively. As innovative measures are thus needed, we evaluate a German pilot...

This paper provides findings of a small-scale, innovative labor training program that uses expressive arts and theatre as a pedagogical tool. The corresponding life skills training component is combined with a technical component teaching vocational skills. To our knowledge, this is the first...

Increasing mothers' labor supply is a key policy challenge in many OECD countries. Germany recently introduced a generous parental benefit that allows for strong consumption smoothing after childbirth and, by taking into account opportunity costs of childbearing, incentivizes working women to...

This paper assesses the importance of reverse causality when evaluating the impact of training duration for unemployed workers. We use planned duration as an instrumental variable for actual duration. Our results suggest that the potential endogeneity of exits seems to be only relevant in the...

Rural electrification is believed to contribute to the achievement of the MDG. In this paper, we investigate electrification impacts on different indicators. We use household data that we collected in Rwanda in villages with and without electricity access. We account for self-selection and...

Causal inference in the empirical sciences is based on counterfactuals. This paper presents the counterfactual account of causation in terms of Lewis's possible-world semantics, and reformulates the statistical potential outcome framework and its underlying assumptions using counterfactual...

This paper estimates causal effects of two Polish active labor market policies - Training and Intervention Works - on employment probabilities. Using data from the 18th wave of the Polish Labor Force Survey we discuss three stages of an appropriately designed matching procedure and demonstrate...

This paper assesses the dynamics of treatment effects arising from variation in the duration of training. We use German administrative data that have the extraordinary feature that the amount of treatment varies continuously from 10 days to 395 days (i.e. 13 months). This feature allows us to...

Measures of Active Labor Market Policy are widely used in European countries, but despite many econometric evaluation studies no conclusive cross-country evidence exists regarding "what program works for what target group under what (economic and institutional) circumstances?". This paper...

This paper investigates the method of matching regarding two crucial implementation choices, the distance measure and the type of algorithm. We implement optimal full matching – a fully efficient algorithm – and present a framework for statistical inference. The implementation uses data from...