A dynamic discrete choice model is set up to estimate the effects of grade retention in high school, both in the short-run (end-of-year evaluation) and in the long-run (drop-out and delay). In contrast to other evaluation approaches, this model captures essential treatment heterogeneity and...

This paper evaluates the impact on the transition to work of a policy reform in Belgium that restricted the access to a specific unemployment insurance scheme for young labor market entrants. This scheme entitles youths with no or little labor market experience to unemployment benefits after a...

Providing income support to unemployed education-leavers reduces the returns to investments in education because it makes the consequences of unemployment less severe. We evaluate a two-part policy reform in Belgium to study whether conditioning the prospective entitlement to unemployment...

We use (donut) regression discontinuity design and difference-in-differences estimators to estimate the impact of a one-shot hiring subsidy targeted at low-educated unemployed youths during the Great Recession recovery in Belgium. The subsidy increases job-finding in the private sector by 10...

We evaluate the effectiveness of placing microchips on the bags for the curbside collection in reducing the unsorted urban solid waste and increasing the fraction recycled. The microchip allows the waste collection company to identify the users that left the bags on the curb and check whether...

We present a meta-analysis on the debate about the "stepping stone vs. dead end" hypothesis related to the causal effect of temporary jobs on future labour market performances. We select academic papers published on international peer-reviewed journals from 1990 until 2021. Among 78 observations...

This paper is a meta-analysis on the relationship between unemployment and health. Our meta-dataset is made up of 327 study results coming from 65 articles published in peer-reviewed journals between 1990 and 2021. We find that publication bias is important, but only for those study results...

We estimate the effect of nonemployment experienced by Italian youth after leaving secondary school on subsequent labor market outcomes. We focus on the impact on earnings and labor market participation both in the short- and in the long-term, up to 25 years since school completion. By...

The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the risk of participating in public events, among them elections. We assess whether the voter turnout in the 2020 local government elections in Italy was affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. We do so by exploiting the variation among municipalities in the...

This article contributes to the nascent literature on the effect of grade retention in school on later labour market success. A field experiment is conducted to rule out the endogeneity of both outcomes. More concretely, various treatments of grade retention are randomly assigned to fictitious...