The federal government's Race to the Top competition has promoted the adoption of test‐based value‐added measures (VAMs) of performance as a component of teacher evaluations throughout many states, but the validity of these measures has been controversial among researchers and widely...

Job protection and cash benefits are key elements of parental leave (PL) systems. We study how these two policy instruments affect return-to-work and medium-run labour market outcomes of mothers of newborn children. Analysing a series of major PL policy changes in Austria, we find that longer...

Parental leave regulations in most OECD countries have two key policy instruments: job protection and cash benefits. This paper studies how mothers’ return to work behavior and labor market outcomes are affected by alternative mixes of these key policy parameters. Exploiting a series of major...

Can different social groups develop different demands for social insurance of risks to health and work? We study this issue across language groups in Switzerland. Language defines social groups and Swiss language groups are separated by a clear geographic border. Actual levels of social...

Parental leave regulations in most OECD countries have two key policy instruments: job protection and cash benefits. This paper studies how mothers’ return to work behavior and labor market outcomes are affected by alternative mixes of these key policy parameters. Exploiting a series of major...

Parental leave regulations in most OECD countries have two key policy instruments: job protection and cash benefits. This paper studies how mothers' return to work behavior and labor market outcomes are affected by alternative mixes of these key policy parameters. Exploiting a series of major...

This paper develops basic algebraic concepts for instrumental variables (IV) regressions which are used to derive the leverage and influence of observations on the 2SLS estimate and compute alternative heteroskedasticity-consistent (HC1, HC2 and HC3) estimators for the 2SLS covariance matrix in...

We conducted an anonymous survey in December 2013 asking around 200 economists worldwide to provide an interval (a to b) of average inflation in the US expected "over the next two years". The respondents were also instructed to give a probability of inflation being higher or lower than the...

I estimate the effect of shocks to subjective mortality hazards on consumption expenditures of retired individuals using the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe. I measure mortality expectations with survey responses on survival probabilities. To create plausibly exogenous...