Education policy-makers and practitioners want to know which policies and practices can best achieve their goals. But research that can inform evidence-based policy often requires complex methods to distinguish causation from accidental association. Avoiding econometric jargon and technical...

This paper presents nonexperimental net impact estimates for the Adult and Dislocated Worker programs under the Workforce Investment Act (WIA), the primary federal job training program in the U.S, based on administrative data from 12 states, covering approximately 160,000 WIA participants and...

A number of researchers and policy makers have recently argued that the most effective way of dealing with long-run disadvantage and the intergenerational transmission of poverty is through early childhood intervention and in particular policies aimed at supporting the family in early childhood...

Evidence from Project STAR has suggested that on average small classes increase student achievement. However, thus far researchers have focused on computing mean differences in student achievement between smaller and larger classes. In this study I focus on the distribution of the small class...

Benefit sanctions imposed on non-compliant welfare recipients are a new element in the German welfare system. In practice, the sanction policy and the application of sanctions vary considerably across the 439 welfare agencies. Based on combined administrative and survey data, these differences...

The retirement decision is under researched in developing and emerging countries, despite the topic's close relation to many development issues such as poverty reduction and social security, and despite the fact that population ageing will increasingly challenge the developing world. This paper...

Structural vector-autoregressive models are potentially very useful tools for guiding both macro- and microeconomic policy. In this paper, we present a recently developed method for exploiting non-Gaussianity in the data for estimating such models, with the aim of capturing the causal structure...

This paper is the first to use a randomized trial in the US to analyze the short- and long-term impacts of an after-school program that offered disadvantaged high-school youth: mentoring, educational services, and financial rewards to attend program activities, complete high-school and enroll in...

Nationwide health interventions are difficult to evaluate as contemporaneous control groups do not exist and before-after approaches are usually infeasible. We propose an alternative semi-parametric estimator that is based on the assumption that the intervention has no direct effect on the...

This paper provides a meta-analysis of 55 empirical studies estimating the employment effects of minimum wages in 15 industrial countries. It strongly confirms the notion that the effects of minimum wages are heterogeneous between countries. As possible sources of heterogeneity, it considers the...