Lifelong learning is often promoted in ageing societies, but little is known about its returns or governments' ability to advance it. This paper evaluates the effects of a large-scale randomized field experiment issuing vouchers for adult education in Switzerland. We find no significant average...

This paper evaluates an Austrian manpower training program, which is highly innovative in its content and financing – and could therefore serve as a role model for other programs. In the late 1980s privatization and down-sizing of nationalized steel firms have lead to large-scale redundancies....

If school closures and social-distancing experiences during the Covid-19 pandemic impeded children's skill development, they may leave a lasting legacy in human capital. To understand the pandemic's effects on school children, this paper combines a review of the emerging international literature...

In spring 2020, governments around the globe shut down schools to mitigate the spread of the novel coronavirus. We argue that low-achieving students may be particularly affected by the lack of educator support during school closures. We collect detailed time-use information on students before...

This study analyses the effects of public-sector-sponsored continuous vocational training and retraining in East Germany after unification with West Germany in 1990. It presents econometric estimates of the average gains from training participation in terms of employment probabilities, earnings,...

This paper proposes a nonparametric method for evaluating treatment effects in the presence of both treatment endogeneity and attrition/non-response bias, using two instrumental variables. Making use of a discrete instrument for the treatment and a continuous instrument for...

This paper investigates active labor market programs in Austria with a special emphasis on male-female effect heterogeneity. On average, we find only small effects, if any, for most of the programs. A crucial advantage of the large and informative administrative data we use is that it provides...

This paper extends the traditional focus of active labor market policy evaluation from a static comparison of participation in a program versus nonparticipation (or participation in another program) to the evaluation of the effects of program sequences, i.e. multiple participation or timing of...

Policies to promote marriage are controversial, and it is unclear whether they are successful. To analyze such policies, it is essential to distinguish between a marriage that is created by a marriage-promoting policy (marginal marriage) and a marriage that would have been formed even in the...

In this paper we evaluate the impact of the old-age part-time scheme (OAPT) on the Austrian labour market which was a policy to allow flexible retirement options for the elderly with an aim to increase labour supply. According to our matching estimates employment probability increases slightly,...