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...

Each year Germany and many other developed economies spend tens of billions of Euros on active measures of employment promotion with the explicit aim of contributing to the reduction of unemployment. Yet, high unemployment has universally been a persistent problem throughout the last two...

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...

Trotz des beachtlichen personellen und finanziellen Aufwands, der in der Bundesrepublik für die Durchführung arbeitsmarktpolitischer Maßnahmen betrieben wird, ist ihr Erfolg in keiner Weise gesichert. Im Gegenteil, die bisherige Evaluierungspraxis verletzt nahezu durchgängig eine der...

Large-scale environmental programs generally commit substantial societal resources, making the evaluation of their actual effects on the relevant outcomes imperative. As the example of the subsidization of energy-saving appliances illustrates, much of the applied environmental economics...

We test whether financial incentives have an effect on weight reduction in a randomized controlled trial involving 700 obese persons assigned to three experimental groups. While two treatment groups obtain €150 and €300, respectively, for achieving an individually assigned target weight...

This study investigates the different cognitive and non-cognitive characteristics associated with individuals' willingness to get vaccinated against Covid-19 and their actual vaccination status. Our empirical analysis is based on data obtained from three survey waves of about 2,000 individuals...

The context of community-based interventions presents formidable problems for any evaluation analysis. Group-randomized studies do possess ideal properties in theory, but in practice, grouprandomization might not be a feasible alternative at all or group-randomized studies might be contaminated....

To measure income inequality with right censored (topcoded) data, we propose multiple imputation for censored observations using draws from Generalized Beta of the Second Kind distributions to provide partially synthetic datasets analyzed using complete data methods. Estimation and inference...