In this study, we promote the estimation of alternative distributional policy parameters that identify horizontal changes in conditional distributions at quantiles from a reference distribution. The motivation underlying the introduction of these new parameters is the comparison of...

The decomposition of gender or ethnic wage gaps into explained and unexplained components (often with the aim to assess labor market discrimination) has been a major research agenda in empirical labor economics. This paper demonstrates that conventional decompositions, no matter whether linear...

Subsidised employment is an important tool of active labour market policies to improve the chances of the unemployed to find permanent employment. Using informative individual administrative data we investigate the effects of two different schemes of subsidised temporary employment implemented...

Using a simulation design that is based on empirical data, a recent study by Huber, Lechner and Wunsch (2012) finds that distance-weighted radius matching with bias adjustment as proposed in Lechner, Miquel and Wunsch (2011) is competitive among a broad range of propensity score-based estimators...

In this note, we show that the OLS and fixed-effects (FE) estimators of the popular differ-ence-in-differences model may deviate when there is time varying panel non-response. If such non-response does not affect the common-trend assumption, then OLS and FE are consistent, but OLS is more...

Most sample selection models assume that the errors are independent of the regressors. Under this assumption, all quantile and mean functions are parallel, which implies that quantile estimators cannot reveal any (per definition non-existing) heterogeneity. However, quantile estimators are...

This survey gives a brief overview of the literature on the difference-in-difference (DiD) estimation strategy and discusses major issues using a treatment effect perspective. In this sense, this survey gives a somewhat different view on DiD than the standard textbook discussion of the...

This paper proposes bootstrap tests for the validity of instrumental variables (IV) in just identified treatment effect models with endogeneity. We demonstrate that the IV assumptions required for the identification of the local average treatment effect (LATE) allow us to both point identify and...

We investigate the finite sample properties of a large number of estimators for the average treatment effect on the treated that are suitable when adjustment for observable covariates is required, like inverse pro¬bability weighting, kernel and other variants of matching, as well as different...

In many empirical problems, the evaluation of treatment effects is complicated by sample selection such that the outcome is only observed for a non-random subpopulation. In the absence of instruments and/or tight parametric assumptions, treatment effects are not point identified, but can be...