Donor agencies and recipient governments want to assess the effectiveness of aid-supported sector policies. Unfortunately, existing methods for impact evaluation are designed for the evaluation of homogeneous interventions (‘projects’) where those with and without ‘treatment’ can be...

The effects of a policy measure often reach the consumer only after one or more intermediate steps, for instance because the measure lowers the cost of an input for an industry producing a consumer good. This paper is concerned with the question how to measure such indirect effects correctly...

This paper analyzes the impact of a leading entrepreneurship education program on college students’ entrepreneurship competencies and intentions using an instrumental variables approach in a difference-in-differences framework. We exploit that the program was offered to students at one...

This model of policy evaluation has been developed to identify factors that cause policy outcomes to diverge from the intended results. In this model the explanatory factors may be inherent to the conceptual and institutional framework to which policy makers adhere, or they may be ‘real...

We study a consumer non-sequential search oligopoly model with search cost heterogeneity. We first prove that an equilibrium in mixed strategies always exists. We then examine the nonparametric identification and estimation of the costs of search. We find that the sequence of points on the...

This paper contributes to the productivity literature by using results from firm-level productivity studies to improve forecasts of macro-level productivity growth. The paper employs current research methods on estimating firm-level productivity to build times-series components that capture the...

We introduce a statistical test for comparing the predictive accuracy of competing copula specifications in multivariate density forecasts, based on the Kullback-Leibler Information Criterion (KLIC). The test is valid under general conditions: in particular it allows for parameter estimation...

Socio-economic interrelationships among regions can be measured in terms of economic flows, migration, or physical geographically-based measures, such as distance or length of shared areal unit boundaries. In general, proximity and openness tend to favour a similar economic performance among...

Under the condition that the observations, which come from a high-dimensional population (<I>X,Y</I>), are strongly stationary and strongly-mixing, through using the local linear method, we investigate, in this paper, the strong Bahadur representation of the nonparametric <I>M</I>-estimator for the unknown...</i></i>

We present a structural framework for the evaluation of public policies intended to increase job search intensity. Most of the literature defines search intensity as a scalar that influences the arrival rate of job offers; here we treat it as the number of job applications that workers send out....