There is a consensus in the international community that rural electrification and, in particular, the productive use of electricity contributes to poverty alleviation. At the same time, efforts to evaluate the impacts of development projects have increased substantially. This paper provides a...

Market-based reforms have been promoted over the past decades to improve the performance of the power sector. This systematic review assesses the effect of market-based reforms in developing countries on intermediate outcomes like technical efficiency and the resulting impacts on electricity...

Household air pollution from biomass cooking is the most significant environmental health risk in the Global South. Interventions to address this risk mostly promote less-polluting stoves and clean fuels, but their diffusion has proven difficult. This paper assesses the potentially complementary...

In 2007, Germany implemented a generous parental leave regulation in order to make parenthood more attractive and more compatible with a working career, especially for mothers. We evaluate the reform using a natural experiment that compares outcomes of parents with children born shortly after...

This paper investigates the causal effect of regional variation in active labor market policy utilizing data for 176 German employment offices and a period covering 2000-2004. In this endeavor, we also analyze the impact of the recent labor market reforms ('Hartz reforms'). We use flow measures...

Having faced high unemployment rates for more than a decade, the German government implemented a comprehensive set of labour market reforms during the period 2003-2005. This paper describes the economic and institutional context of the German labour market before and after these so-called Hartz...

Der vorliegende Beitrag analysiert anhand eines natürlichen Experiments die mittelfristigen Effekte der Elterngeldreform in Ost- und Westdeutschland. Die Einführung des Elterngeldsim Jahr 2007 hat zu substanziellen Veränderungen in der mittelfristigen Erwerbsbeteiligung (drei bis fünf Jahre...

Reducing youth unemployment and generating more and better youth employment opportunities are key policy challenges worldwide. Active labor market programs for disadvantaged youth may be an effective tool in such cases, but the results have often been disappointing in Organisation for Economic...

While high rates of youth unemployment are a severe problem in most European countries, the program evaluation literature shows that di sadvantaged youths constitute a group that is particularly difficult to assist effectively. As innovative measures are thus needed, we evaluate a German pilot...