Providing a decent living standard and preventing old-age poverty are the two major challenges of pension insurance schemes. Replacement rates below the poverty line despite many years of contribution represent a major challenge for public pension schemes with respect to the systems "raison...

The traditional approach to estimate spatial models bases on a preconceived spatial weights matrix to measure spatial interaction among locations. The a priori assumptions used to define this matrix are supposed to be in line with the "true" spatial relationships among the locations of the...

This dissertation introduces three novel approaches for the econometric evaluation of heterogeneous treatment effects. The proposed methods consider the effects of a binary treatment on different characteristics of the outcome distribution.Section 1 proposes an estimation method for various...