Does an individual's housing situation affect community social capital and influence regional development through this channel? A body of literature which followed the seminal work of DiPasquale and Glaeser suggests that homeownership is positively related to social capital formation due to both...

We highlight the importance of randomisation bias, a situation where the process of participation in a social experiment has been affected by randomisation per se. We illustrate how this has happened in the case of the UK Employment Retention and Advancement (ERA) experiment, in which over one...

There is a large theoretical literature on methods for estimating causal effects under unconfoundedness, exogeneity, or selection-on-observables type assumptions using matching or propensity score methods. Much of this literature is highly technical and has not made inroads into empirical...

Abstract In some applications, researchers using the synthetic control method (SCM) to evaluate the effect of a policy may struggle to determine whether they have identified a “good match” between the control group and treated group. In this paper, we demonstrate the utility of the mean and...

Self management of natural resources has started to gain increasing attention as an alternative tool to command-and-control and market-based tools, but the fundamental question remains: is self management economically beneficial such that it should be promoted in the first place? This article...

This study analyses the effects of public sector sponsored vocational training on individual unemployment and employment duration in East Germany. The data is taken from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP). The empirical analysis is limited to training measures that took place between July...

We estimate the effect of training quality on earnings using a Peruvian program, which targets disadvantaged youths. The identification of causal effects is possible because of two attractive features in the data. First, selection of training courses is based on public bidding processes that...

This paper investigates the effects of retirement on various health outcomes. Data stem from the first three waves of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA). With this informative data, non-parametric matching methods can be applied to identify causal effects. It is found that...

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of market-based approaches in the provision of public-sponsored training programs. In particular, we study the link between training quality and labor earnings using a Peruvian program that targets disadvantaged youths. Multiple proxies for training quality...