This chapter discusses several important topics related to randomization in field experiments. In the field, researchers face constraints in the design they can implement and/or the type of data that can be collected. The chapter looks at such constraints from the point of view of randomization....

This paper is a practical guide (a toolkit) for researchers, students and practitioners wishing to introduce randomization as part of a research design in the field. It first covers the rationale for the use of randomization, as a solution to selection bias and a partial solution to publication...

This paper is a practical guide (a toolkit) for researchers, students and practitioners wishing to introduce randomization as part of a research design in the field. It first covers the rationale for the use of randomization, as a solution to selection bias and a partial solution to publication...

Good understanding on the human capital externalities is important for both policy makers and social science researchers. Economists have speculated for at least a century that the social returns to education may exceed the private returns. In this paper, using the longitudinal data from China...

Using longitudinal data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey, we examine how individual wages change in line with the share of college graduates in a given province. The individual fixed effect model shows that the external returns to education in China appear to be zero. We estimate an...

While high rates of youth unemployment are a severe problem in most European countries, the program evaluation literature shows that di sadvantaged youths constitute a group that is particularly difficult to assist effectively. As innovative measures are thus needed, we evaluate a German pilot...

Social surveys are often used to estimate unemployment duration distributions. Survey non-response may then cause a bias. We study this by using a data set that combines survey information of individual workers with administrative records of the same workers. The latter provide information on...

Across countries, women own significantly fewer businesses than do men. We show that this is due, in large part, to the fact that the propensity to start businesses of women is significantly lower than that of men. The lower propensity of women, in turn, appears to be highly correlated to...

This paper investigates the occupational attainment and job mobility of permanent ruralto-urban migrants and compares them with migrants who were born with an urban hukou. Using data from the 2003 China General Social Survey, we examine how much of the gaps in occupational-prestige scores...

Active labour market policies (ALMPs) may play an important role in preventing an increase in long-term unemployment following the Great Recession. We consider this issue for Denmark, a country relying extensively on this instrument. We present evidence on the effectiveness of ALMPs as a way of...