In practice, social and development interventions are often targeted at groups or individuals with the largest expected benefits. In such cases, treatment effects are usually affected by selection on unobservable factors. We show that modeling the process of selective intervention placement...

We present a theoretical framework which allows for the comparison of the effectiveness of tax measures, loans and funding, in supporting industry-oriented research. We estimate for each of the instruments the exact contribution required by a firm to decide on investing in R&D, given the costs...

A new and rapidly growing econometric literature is making advances in the problem of using machine learning (ML) methods for causal inference questions. Yet, the empirical economics literature has not started to fully exploit the strengths of these modern methods. We revisit influential...

The econometrics literature proposed several new causal machine learning methods (CML) in the past few years. These methods harness the strength of machine learning methods to flexibly model the relationship between the treatment, outcome and confounders, while providing valid inferential...

This paper explores how a conditional cash transfer program influences students' schooling decisions when program payments stop in the middle of the school career. To that end, I examine Mexico's Progresa, which covered students only until the end of middle school (at age 15) in its early years....

Public benefit-cost analysis of market policies often relies on a particular definition of market surplus that adds up consumer and producer surplus and external costs. This paper provides an overview of conceptual strategies to deal with moral considerations and then develops an adjusted market...

Even though economic models have been relatively successful in explaining the long run patterns of house prices, they have more difficulties in explaining short run developments of the housing markets. However, the fact that during such ‘bubbles’ the spatial pattern of house prices, which...

We study mergers in a market where N firms sell a homogeneous good and consumers search sequentially to discover prices. The main motivation for such an analysis is that mergers generally affect market prices and thereby, in a search environment, the search behavior of consumers. Endogenous...

This paper is the first to examine the effect of minimum price guaranteesin a sequential search model. Minimum price guarantees are notadvertised and only known to consumers when they come to the shop.We show that in such an environment, minimum price guarantees increasethe value of buying the...