This paper evaluates the effects of a high school curriculum reform that was introduced in one German state on high school dropout. The reform increased the standards of the curriculum by reducing the freedom of choice in course selection (amongst other things) resulting in an increase in the...

This paper presents an original econometric model for estimating a dose-response function through a regression approach when: (i) treatment is continuous, (ii) individuals may react heterogeneously to observable confounders, and (iii) selection-into-treatment may be potentially endogenous. After...

This paper estimates the impact of two productive development programs (PDPs) in Costa Rica: PROPYME and CR Provee. The first seeks to increase the capacity of small and medium-sized firms (SMEs) to innovate, and the second aims to increase backward linkages between Costa Rican SMEs and...

In the absence of third party and prepayment systems such as health insurance and tax-based healthcare financing, households in many low-income countries are exposed to the financial risks of paying large medical bills from out-of-pocket. In recent years, community based health insurance schemes...

A new and rapidly growing econometric literature is making advances in the problem of using machine learning (ML) methods for causal inference questions. Yet, the empirical economics literature has not started to fully exploit the strengths of these modern methods. We revisit influential...

Subsidizing the geographical mobility of unemployed workers may improve welfare by relaxing their financial constraints and allowing them to find jobs in more prosperous regions. We exploit regional variation in the promotion of mobility programs along administrative borders of German employment...

The econometrics literature proposed several new causal machine learning methods (CML) in the past few years. These methods harness the strength of machine learning methods to flexibly model the relationship between the treatment, outcome and confounders, while providing valid inferential...

Une question récurrente qui déroute plusieurs chercheurs et certains responsables politiques est celle de savoir pourquoi les évaluations d'impact, qui sont devenues monnaie courante dans le domaine du développement, ont si peu d'impact sur la prise de décision à proprement parler. Dans...

Using a rich and unique combined administrative-survey dataset, this paper explores how sensitive propensity score (PS) matching estimates of Active Labor Market Policies (ALMPs) based on the selection-on-observables assumption are to typically unobserved covariates. Using a sample of German...

Katharina Wedel prepared this study while she was working at the Center for the Economics of Education at the ifo Institute. The study was completed in September 2023 and accepted as doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at LMU Munich. It consists of four distinct empirical essays that...