We use (donut) regression discontinuity design and difference-in-differences estimators to estimate the impact of a one-shot hiring subsidy targeted at low-educated unemployed youths during the Great Recession recovery in Belgium. The subsidy increases job-finding in the private sector by 10...

We introduce tax competition for mobile labor into an optimal-taxation model with two skill levels. We analyze a symmetric subgame-perfect Nash equilibrium of the game between two governments and two taxpayer populations. Tax competition reduces the distortion from the informational asymmetry...

We provide evidence that the robust association between cognitive skills and economic growth reflects a causal effect of cognitive skills and supports the economic benefits of effective school policy. We develop a new common metric that allows tracking student achievement across countries, over...

Based on administrative data of unemployed in Belgium, we estimate the labour market effects of three training programmes at various aggregation levels using Modified Causal Forests, a causal machine learning estimator. While all programmes have positive effects after the lock-in period, we find...

We use (donut) regression discontinuity design and difference-in-differences estimators to estimate the impact of a one-shot hiring subsidy targeted at low-educated unemployed youths during the Great Recession recovery in Belgium. The subsidy increases job-finding in the private sector by 10...

In 2015, 15% of all children in China were left behind in the countryside because at least one of their parents migrated to a city. We implement an event study analysis between 2010 and 2018 on five waves of the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) to investigate the dynamic effects of parental...

Cross-country evidence on student achievement might be hampered by omitted country characteristics such as language or legal differences. This paper uses cross-state variation in Germany, whose sixteen states share the same language and legal system, but pursue different education policies. The...

Nineteenth-Century Catholic doctrine strongly opposed state schooling. We show that countries with larger shares of Catholics in 1900 (but without a Catholic state religion) tend to have larger shares of privately operated schools even today. We use this historical pattern as a natural...