In this paper we investigate the causal effect of life expectancy on economic growth by explicitly accounting for the role of the demographic transition. In addition to focusing on issues of empirical identification, this paper emphasizes the role of the econometric specification. We present a...

In this paper we investigate the causal effect of life expectancy on economic growth by explicitly accounting for the role of the demographic transition. In addition to focusing on issues of empirical identification, this paper emphasizes the role of the econometric specification. We present a...

This paper examines the effects of remedial mathematics on performance in university-level economics courses using a natural experiment. We study exam results prior and subsequent to the implementation of a remedial mathematics course that was compulsory for a sub-set of students and unavailable...

This paper reports about a randomized field experiment in which first year economics and business students at the University of Amsterdam could earn financial rewards for passing the first year requirements within one year. Participants were assigned to a high, low and zero (control) reward...

This paper investigates the effects of five different vocational rehabilitation (VR) programs on the hazard rates into employment, disability and temporarily withdrawals from the labor market for persons who face severe problems in re-entering the labor market, mostly due to medical problems....

Crowd-out, the switching from private to public insurance, is often found, but estimates are rarely consistent with prior measurements. Cutler and Gruber (1996) found crowd-out in up to half of the newly eligible children, while Card and Shore-Sheppard (2004) found almost none. This paper...

The empirical evidence of the effect of intergenerational coresidence by elderly parents and their adult children on parental health remains fairly inconclusive. The aim of this paper is twofold: (1) to estimate a reliable coresidence effect and (2) to investigate why the coresidence effect can...

This note estimates the causal effect of life expectancy on per capita income and tests the hypothesis of a non-monotonic effect using finite mixture models. The results confirm the hypothesis and qualify recent evidence for a negative effect by Acemoglu and Johnson (2007).

Regressions that control for confounding factors are the workhorse of evaluation research. When treatment effects are heterogeneous, however, the workhorse regression leads to estimated treatment effects that lack behavioral interpretations even when the selection on observables assumption...

This chapter provides a selective review of some contemporary approaches to program evaluation. One motivation for our review is the recent emergence and increasing use of a particular kind of program in applied microeconomic research, the so-called Regression Discontinuity (RD) Design of...