This paper documents the negative link between the age of Russian cities and their average wage. This link is robust to various definitions of city age and sample censuring, the inclusion of regional and time fixed effects, dependent variable spatial lag and many urban characteristics. This link...

The launch of Viagra in April 1998 led to a historically unprecedented high usage of erectile dysfunction (ED) drugs. We test whether Viagra's introduction significantly influenced outcomes for its target population such as STD rates of older men, as well as its non-target populations, such as...

Background: Early childhood diarrheal disease jeopardizes child development by diverting nutrition away from physical and mental growth towards fighting illness. Consequently, early exposure to clean water interventions, which reduce diarrheal risk, may confer positive effects on downstream...

The German health care reform of 2004 imposes a charge of 10 Euro for the first visit to a doctor in each quarter of the year. At first glance, there is no inhibiting effect of this fee on utilization in the German Socio-Economic Panel. However, this study reveals that the true effect is...

Does the death penalty save lives? A surge of recent interest in this question has yielded a series of papers purporting to show robust and precise estimates of a substantial deterrent effect of capital punishment. We assess the various approaches that have been used in this literature, testing...

In East Germany, active labour market policies (ALMPs) are used on a large scale to contain fast rising unemployment after unification. This paper evaluates the effects for participants in public employment programmes (PEPs), that are an important part of ALMPs. It focuses on individual...

One of the principle aims of the Working Families' Tax Credit in the UK was to increase the participation of single mothers. The literature to date concludes there was approximately a five-percentage-point increase in employment of single mothers. The differences-in-differences methodology that...

This document presents an overview of econometric tools recently developed for empirical ex post policy evaluation. The emphasis is laid on selection problems (how to disentangle the real effect of a policy from the personal features of the affected people), and on the practical issues of a...