This paper provides a preliminary assessment of recent reforms of German employment promotion policy. While several recent studies analyze the impact of measures of employment promotion for the case of Germany, no comparable study exists on the aggregate level, thus precluding any assessment of...

Labor market frictions are not the only possible factor responsible for high unemployment. Credit market imperfections, driven by microeconomic frictions and impacted upon by macroeconomic factors such as monetary policy, could also be to blame. This paper shows that labor and credit market...

The assumption that the assignment to treatments is ignorable conditional on attributes plays an important role in the applied statistic and econometric evaluation literature. Another term for it is conditional independence assumption. This paper discusses identification when there are more than...

The major contribution of this paper is ending a new and flexible way to measure the effects of selection on log-wages. In this context, we offer a general approach to performing decomposition analysis when selection effects are present. We call the difference between unconditional and...

Since interventions by the public sector generally commit substantial societal resources, the evaluation of effects and costs of policy interventions is imperative. This paper outlines why program evaluation should follow well-respected scientific standards and why it should be performed by...

Previous studies on gender wage discrimination have relied on OLS when estimating the wage equations. However, there exists a number of recent studies, devoted to estimating the return to education, that have shown that OLS may produce biased estimates for a number of reasons. Consequently, if...

We model how unemployment benefit sanctions - benefit reductions that are imposed if unemployed do not comply with job search guidelines - affect unemployment. In our analysis we find that not only micro effects concerning the behavior of individual unemployed workers are relevant, but also...

The evaluation of interventions such as active labor market policies or medical programs by means of a randomized controlled trial is often considered the gold standard. However, randomized experiments might face severe shortcomings especially if performed at the group level. One such problem is...

We show why considering a number of education-dependent covariates in the wage equation decreases coefficient of education in the wage equation. We use a meta-analysis of results for Portugal to show, empirically, that this is the case. The coefficient decreases when we use covariates that can...