In July 2004, the Belgian government intensified monitoring within the Unemployment Insurance scheme. Workers claiming unemployment benefits for more than 13 months are notified that past job-search behavior will be monitored 8 months later. In one region the target group is counselled shortly...

Since July 2004 the job search effort of long-term unemployed benefit claimants is monitored in Belgium. We exploit the discontinuity in the treatment assignment at the age of 30 to evaluate the effect of a notification sent at least 8 months before job search is verified. The threat of...

Many countries support business start-ups to spur economic growth and reduce unemployment with different programmes. Evaluation studies of such programmes commonly rely on the conditional independence assumption (CIA), allowing a causal interpretation of the results only if all relevant...

In July 2004, the Belgian government intensified monitoring within the Unemployment Insurance scheme. Workers claiming unemployment benefits for more than 13 months are notified that past job-search behavior will be monitored 8 months later. In one region the target group is counselled shortly...

The paper derives the optimal carbon tax in closed-form from an integrated assessment of climate change. The formula shows how carbon, temperature, and economic dynamics quantify the optimal mitigation effort. The model’s descriptive power is comparable to numeric models used in policy...

World income grows fast without verifiable climate-change impacts on the economy. The growth spell can end if climate impacts turn real but this can take decades to learn. We develop a tractable stochastic climate-economy model with a hidden-state impact process to evaluate the contributions of...

There are many reasons to suspect that benefit-cost analysis applied to environmental policies will result in policy decisions that will reject those environmental policies. The important question, of course, is whether those rejections are based on proper science. The present paper explores...

Should public assets such as infrastructure, education, and the environment earn the same return as private investments? The long-term nature of public investments provides commitment to current preferences, which justifies lower than private returns for time-inconsistent decision markers. An...

Climate change not only impacts production and market consumption, but also the relative scarcity of non-market goods, such as environmental amenities. We study fundamental drivers of the resulting relative price changes, their potential magnitude, and their implications for climate policy in...

Discounting future costs and benefits is a crucial yet contentious practice in the appraisal of long-term public projects with environmental consequences. The standard approach typically neglects that ecosystem services are not easily substitutable with manufactured goods and often exhibit...