Much has been said about the stylized fact that the economically successful are not only wealthier but also healthier than the less affluent. There is little doubt about the existence of this socio-economic gradient in health, but there remains a vivid debate about its source. In this paper, we...

The UK National Audit Office (NAO) scrutinises public spending on behalf of Parliament, helping it to hold government departments to account and helping public bodies improve performance and delivery. We publish around 60 value for money studies each year across a range of government activities,...

This paper reviews methods that seek to draw causal inference from non-experimental data and shows how they can be applied to undertake ex-post evaluation of transport interventions. In particular, the paper discusses the underlying principles of techniques for treatment effect estimation with...

Evaluation studies aim to provide answers to important questions like: How does this program or policy intervention affect the outcome variables of interest? In order to answer such questions, using the traditional statistical evaluation (or causal inference) methods, some conditions must be...

We investigate the behaviour of the Lasso for selecting invalid instruments in linear instrumental variables models for estimating causal effects of exposures on outcomes, as proposed recently by Kang, Zhang, Cai and Small (2016, Journal of the American Statistical Association). Invalid...

Randomised controlled or clinical trials (RCTs) are generally viewed as the most reliable method to draw causal inference as to the effects of a treatment, as they should guarantee that the individuals being compared differ only in terms of their exposure to the treatment of interest. This 'gold...

Eine wichtige zwischen den Bundesländern variierende schulrechtliche Regelung ist die Verbindlichkeit der Schullaufbahnempfehlung beim Übergang von der Grundschule auf die weiterführenden Schulen. Während sie in einigen Bundesländern bindend ist, wird in anderen Bundesländern den Eltern...

Ancillary experiments' are a new technique whereby researchers use a completed experiment conducted by others to recover causal estimates of a randomized intervention on new outcomes. The method requires pairing new outcome data with randomized treatments the researchers themselves did not...

Carbon taxes are commonly seen as a rational policy response to climate change, but little is known about their performance from an ex-post perspective. This paper analyzes the emissions and cost impacts of the UK CPS, a carbon tax levied on all fossil-fired power plants. To overcome the problem...

We place young professionals into established firms to shadow middle managers. Using random assignment into program participation, we find positive average effects on wage employment, but no average effect on the likelihood of self-employment. We match individuals to firms using a...