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 this paper, we assess the impact of firms introducing part-time work schemes for gradual labour market exit of elderly workers on their employees' labour market outcomes. The analysis is based on unique linked employer-employee data that combine high-quality survey and administrative data....

We study the treatment effect of grade retention, using a panel of French junior highschool students, taking unobserved heterogeneity and the endogeneity of grade repetitions into account. We specify a multi-stage model of human-capital accumulation with a finite number of types representing...

This paper proposes a difference-in-differences approach for disentangling a total treatment effect on some outcome into a direct impact as well as an indirect effect operating through a binary intermediate variable - or mediator - within strata defined upon how the mediator reacts to the...

This paper discusses the evaluation problem using observational data when the timing of treatment is an outcome of a stochastic process. We show that, without additional assumptions, it is not possible to estimate the average treatment effect and treatment on the treated. It is, however,...

This paper investigates the impact of the public smoking ban which came into effect in Italy on January 2005 on individual smoking behaviour. Current empirical evidence supports the existence of a negative effect of the Italian ban on smoking prevalence and consumption in the general population....

Applied work often studies the effect of a binary variable (“treatment”) using linear models with additive effects. I study the interpretation of the OLS estimands in such models when treatment effects are heterogeneous. I show that the treatment coefficient is a convex combination of two...

We propose a novel approach for causal mediation analysis based on changes-in-changes assumptions restricting unobserved heterogeneity over time. This allows disentangling the causal effect of a binary treatment on a continuous outcome into an indirect effect operating through a binary...

Structural econometric methods are often criticized for being sensitive to functional form assumptions. We study parametric estimators of the local average treatment effect (LATE) derived from a widely used class of latent threshold crossing models and show they yield LATE estimates...

We analyse all the major sources of direct and indirect R&D subsidies in Norway in the period 2002-2013 and compare their effects on individual firms’ performance. Firms that received support are matched with a control group of firms that did not receive support using a combination of...