Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate educational mismatch and its interrelationships with unemployment duration. Design/methodology/approach – The authors study unemployment histories of Italian workers using dependent competing risk models. The authors evaluate the impact...

This study explores the effects of air pollution on self-reported health status and the health related costs in UK. The estimates are based on data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS). The effects of air pollution on individuals' health status are estimated and their monetary value is...

This note provides a simple exposition of what IV can and cannot estimate in a model with binary treatment variable and heterogenous treatment effects. It shows how linear IV is essentially a misspecification of functional form and the reason why linear IV estimates will generally depend on the...

A number of recent empirical studies have found no evidence that the minimum wage adversely affects employment. Explanations for such non-negative estimates include new theoretical approaches, empirical identification and data issues. In this paper we examine the robustness of such estimates to...

Abstract Theory and simulations show that variables affecting the outcome only through exposure, known as instrumental variables (IVs), should be excluded from propensity score (PS) models. In pharmacoepidemiologic studies based on automated healthcare databases, researchers will sometimes use a...

Abstract Confounding by indication is a critical challenge in evaluating the effectiveness of surgical interventions using observational data. The threat from confounding is compounded when using medical claims data due to the inability to measure risk severity. If there are unobserved...

Abstract Instrumental variables is a popular method in epidemiology and related fields, to estimate causal effects in the presence of unmeasured confounding. Traditionally, instrumental variable analyses have been confined to linear models, in which the causal parameter of interest is typically...

Summary This paper is concerned with the effect of vocational training on individual unemployment duration in West Germany. The data base used in this study is the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) for West Germany for the period from 1984 to 1994. The econometric model is a semi-parametric...

Summary This paper surveys the empirical evidence on causal effects of education on earnings for Germany and compares alternative studies in the light of their underlying identifying assumptions. We work out the different assumptions taken by various studies, which lead to rather different...

Abstract Conventional wisdom dictates that the more we know about a problem domain the easier it is to predict the effects of policies in that domain. Strangely, this wisdom is not sanctioned by formal analysis, when the notions of “knowledge” and “policy” are given concrete definitions...