The Great Recession triggered a resurgence of short-time work (STW) throughout the OECD. Several countries introduced from scratch STW or significantly expanded the scope of the programmes already in place. In some countries like Italy, Japan and Germany between 2.5 and 5 per cent of the...

We evaluate a comprehensive activation program in Norway targeted at hard-to-employ social assistance claimants with reduced work capacity. The program offers a combination of tailored rehabilitation, training and job practice, and a generous, stable, and non-means-tested benefit. Its main aims...

This overview describes the development of methods for empirical research in the field of labor economics during the past four decades. This period is characterized by the use of micro data to answer policy relevant research question. Prominent in the literature is the search for exogenous...

We investigate the effects of meetings between the unemployed and their case workers on the transition rate from unemployment to employment using detailed Danish event history data obtained from administrative registers. We find large positive effects of meetings. The transition rate strongly...

We evaluate the effect of the size of deductibles in the basic health insurance in Switzerland on the probability of a doctor visit. We employ nonparametric bounding techniques to minimise statistical assumptions. In order to tighten the bounds we consider three further assumptions: mean...

We build on Rosenzweig and Wolpin (2000) and Keane (2010) and show that in order to fulfill the Instrumental variable (IV) identifying moment condition, a policy must be designed so that compliers and non-compliers either have the same average error term, or have an error term ratio equal to...

We provide a number of contributions of policy, practical and methodological interest to the study of the returns to educational qualifications in the presence of misreporting. First, we provide the first reliable estimates of a highly policy relevant parameter for the UK, namely the return from...

This paper develops and estimates a model with multiple schooling choices that identifies the causal effect of different levels of schooling on health, health-related behaviors, and labor market outcomes. We develop an approach that is a halfway house between a reduced form treatment effect...

In this paper we study doubly robust estimators of various average treatment effects under unconfoundedness. We unify and extend much of the recent literature by providing a very general identification result which covers binary and multi-valued treatments; unnormalized and normalized weighting;...

This paper investigates the short-term effects of public smoking bans on individual smoking behavior. In 2007 and 2008, state-level smoking bans were gradually introduced in all of Germany's sixteen federal states. We exploit this variation in the timing of state bans to identify the effect that...