We explore the far-reaching implications of replacing current unemployment benefit (UB) systems by an unemployment accounts (UA) system. Under the UA system, employed people are required to make ongoing contributions to their UAs and the balances in these accounts are available to them during...

Are bans effective at lowering child labor and increasing school attendance and, if so, do these effects lead to positive outcomes later in life? This paper seeks to answer these questions by examining the effect of a 1998 Brazilian law that increased the minimum employment age from 14 to 16. To...

Knowledge of treatment effect heterogeneity or "essential heterogeneity" plays an important role in our understanding of how programs work and in the design of systems to allocate them among the eligible. This paper provides a relatively non-technical survey of the current state of the treatment...

Binary treatments are often ex-post aggregates of multiple treatments or can be disaggregated into multiple treatment versions. Thus, effects can be heterogeneous due to either effect or treatment heterogeneity. We propose a decomposition method that uncovers masked heterogeneity, avoids...

This chapter summarizes the literature on the evaluation of immigration policies. It brings together two strands of the literature dealing with the evaluation of labor market programs and with the economic integration of immigrants. Next to immigrant selection and settlement policies, there are...

The distribution of unemployment duration in our equilibrium matching model with spell-dependent unemployment benefits displays a time-varying exit rate. Building on Semi-Markov processes, we translate these exit rates into an expression for the aggregate unemployment rate. Structural estimation...

Low-wage subsidies are often proposed as a solution to the unemployment problem among the low skilled. Yet the empirical evidence on the effects of low-wage subsidies is surprisingly scarce. This paper examines the employment effects of a Finnish payroll tax subsidy scheme, which is targeted at...

This paper implements a method to identify and estimate treatment effects in a dynamic setting where treatments may occur at any point in time. By relating the standard matching approach to the timing-of-events approach, it demonstrates that effects of the treatment on the treated at a given...