As the first, substantive contribution, this paper revisits the effectiveness of two widely used public sponsored training programs, the first one focusing on intensive occupational training and the second one on short-term activation and job entry. We use an exceptionally rich administrative...

This paper provides the first experimental evaluation of the participatory budgeting model showing that it increased public participation in the process of public decision making, increased local tax revenues collection, channeled larger fractions of public budgets to services stated as top...

This paper evaluates the impact of the Bono Trabajador Activo, a training voucher program in Chile, on workers' labor market outcomes. Using detailed administrative datasets of the National Employment Service and the Unemployment Insurance System, we apply difference-in-difference and IV...

This paper uses private and environmental cost data for the Netherlands to evaluate the social cost of two final waste disposal methods, landfilling versus incineration using waste-to-energy (WTE) plants. The data only provide some support for the widespread policy preference for incineration...

We examine effects of urban passenger rail upgrades to Auckland's Western Line, including double tracking, station development, and related urban renewal projects. The results are used to assess anticipated net benefits of the developments. The rail-related upgrades are expected to be completed...

Climate policies have stochastic consequences that involve a great number of generations. This calls for evaluating social risk (what kind of societies will future people be born into) rather than individual risk (what will happen to people during their own lifetimes). As a response we propose...

This study proposes a consistent definition of natural disaster damage costs, i.e., equivalently, of natural disaster prevention benefits in accordance with general definition of benefits, Willingness to Pay, more concretely, Equivalent Variation, of any policy such as tax reforms,...

The Ramsey rule for the consumption rate of discount assumes a transfer of money of a (representative) agent at one point in time to the same agent at another point in time. Climate policy (implicitly) transfers money not just over time but also between agents. I propose three alternative...

In this paper we develop a framework to value public investments with the purpose of increasing bicycling that explicitly accounts internal costs of bicycling, which are typically neglected in current established approaches that value bicycle spending by means of gross health benefits alone, as...

This paper identifies the causal impact of urban rail transport on firm location. The evaluation of transport infrastructures always faces an important issue of endogeneity since rail lines are not randomly located. We use the natural experiment offered by the Regional Express Rail (RER) in the...