The welfare contributions of the digital economy, characterized by the proliferation of new and free goods, are not well-measured in our current national accounts. We derive explicit terms for the welfare contributions of these goods and introduce a new metric, GDP-B which quantifies their...

This paper investigates the effect of firing costs on total factor productivity (TFP) and resource allocation. Exploiting heterogeneous changes in firing costs across employee types in Belgium, we find that increasing firing costs reduce firm-level TFP. Firms facing a net increase in firing...

This paper investigates the use of Design of Experiments in observational studies in order to select informative observations and features for classification. D-optimal plans are searched for in existing data and based on these plans the variables most relevant for classification are determined....

Many social experiments are run in multiple waves, or are replications of earlier social experiments. In principle, the sampling design can be modified in later stages or replications to allow for more efficient estimation of causal effects. We consider the design of a two-stage experiment for...