In this chapter, we evaluate the employment effects of job-creation schemes (JCS) on the participating individuals in Germany. JCS are a major element of active labour market policy in Germany and are targeted at long-term unemployed and other hard-to-place individuals. Access to very...

In this chapter, we characterise the selection into parenthood for men and women separately and estimate the effects of motherhood and fatherhood on wages. We apply propensity score matching exploiting an extensive high-quality register-based data set augmented with family background...

This chapter demonstrates that fixed-effects and first-differences models often understate the effect of interest because of the variation used to identify the model. In particular, the within-unit time-series variation often reflects transitory fluctuations that have little effect on behavioral...

Lechner and Miquel (2001) approached the causal analysis of sequences of interventions from a potential outcome perspective based on selection-on-observables-type assumptions (sequential conditional independence assumptions). Lechner (2004) proposed matching estimators for this framework....

Programs are typically evaluated through the average treatment effect and its standard error. In particular, is the treatment effect positive and is it statistically significant? In theory, programs should be evaluated in a decision framework, using social welfare functions and posterior...

We apply a recently suggested econometric approach to measure the effects of active labor market programs on employment, unemployment, and wage histories among participants. We find that participation in most of these training programs produces an initial locking-in effect and for some even a...

Although the theoretical trade-off between the quantity and quality of children is well established, empirical evidence supporting such a causal relationship is limited. This chapter applies a recently developed nonparametric estimator of the conditional local average treatment effect to assess...

We show that in sorting cross-sectional data, the endogeneity of a variable may be successfully detected by graphically examining the cumulative sum of the recursive residuals. Moreover, the sign of the bias implied by the endogeneity may be deducible through such graphs. In general,...