In empirical studies it often happens that some variables for some units are far away from the other observations in the sample. These extreme observations, or outliers, often have a large impact on the results of statistical analyses – conclusions based on a sample with and without these...

This paper makes three contributions. (1) It summarizes in tabular form a recent literature made of 36 micro-econometric studies for 16 different countries on the relationship between export destination and firm performance. (2) It reports estimates of the productivity premium of German firms...

An emerging literature on international activities of heterogeneous firms documents that exporting firms are more productive than firms that only sell on the national market. This positive exporter productivity premium shows up in a large number of empirical studies after controlling for...

This paper investigates the short term effects of a large scale intervention, funded by the European Social Fund, that provides additional instruction time to students in low achieving lower secondary schools of Southern Italy. We control for sorting across classes using the fact that freshman...

Although the theoretical trade-off between the quantity and quality of children is well-established, empirical evidence supporting such a causal relationship − particularly on child health − is limited. We use two measures of child health to asses the quantity-quality trade-off across the...

The “common effect” model in program evaluation assumes that all treated individuals have the same impact from a program. Our paper contributes to the recent literature that tests and goes beyond the common effect model by investigating impact heterogeneity using data from the experimental...

This paper develops IV estimators for unconditional quantile treatment effects (QTE) when the treatment selection is endogenous. In contrast to conditional QTE, i.e. the effects conditional on a large number of covariates X, the unconditional QTE summarize the effects of a treatment for the...

We assess the effectiveness of Job Corps (JC), the largest job training program targeting disadvantaged youth in the United States, by constructing nonparametric bounds for the average and quantile treatment effects of the program on wages. Our preferred estimates point toward convincing...

Primary school enrolment rates are very low in francophone Africa. In order to enhance education supply, many countries have launched large teacher recruitment programmes in recent years, whereby teachers are no longer engaged on civil servant positions, but on the basis of (fixed-term)...

We examine the (potentially nonlinear) relationship between inequality and growth using a method which does not require an a priori assumption on the underlying functional form. This approach reveals a plateau completely missed by commonly used (nonlinear) parametric approaches - the economy...