In Belgium school-leavers are entitled to unemployment benefits after a waiting period and eligible to intensified counselling and training in the Youth Work Plan (YWP) if a job is not found within three months. The length of the waiting period and eligibility to the YWP are sharply determined...

Pilot and demonstration (P&D) projects are commonly deployed to catalyze early adoption of technology, but are poorly understood in terms of mechanism and impact. We conceptually distinguish unique functions of pilots and demonstrations, then examine whether they accelerate green building...

Education policy-makers and practitioners want to know which policies and practices can best achieve their goals. But research that can inform evidence-based policy often requires complex methods to distinguish causation from accidental association. Avoiding econometric jargon and technical...

This paper evaluates the impact on the transition to work of a policy reform in Belgium that restricted the access to a specific unemployment insurance scheme for young labor market entrants. This scheme entitles youths with no or little labor market experience to unemployment benefits after a...

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...

To fight the spread of Covid-19, many countries implemented unprecedented social distancing policies. This is the first paper that uses an event-study approach to examine the effects of the German social distancing policies on (a) individual behavior and (b) the spread of the epidemic. Combining...

This paper evaluates the risk of zombification of the French economy during the sanitary crisis, as a result of the unconditional financial support provided to firms by public authorities. We develop a simple theoretical framework based on a partial-equilibrium model to simulate the liquidity...

We estimate the impact of a large curriculum reform in Switzerland that substantially increased the share of foreign language classes in compulsory school on students' subsequent educational choices in upper secondary school. Using administrative student register data and exploiting the...

Conflicting societal goals can lead to national and local policies that are at odds with each other. National policies promoting the adoption of solar photovoltaics may be counteracted by local policies defining the aesthetics of the built environment. As solar photovoltaic energy approaches...

In this paper, we investigate the use of interactive effect or linear factor models in regional policy evaluation. We contrast treatment effect estimates obtained by Bai (2009)'s least squares method with the popular difference in differences estimates as well as with estimates obtained using...