Estimating the effects of demographic events on households living standards introduces a range of statistical issues. In this paper we analyze this topic considering our observational study as a quasi-experiment in which the treatment is expressed by childbearing events between two time points...

This paper aims to answer to what extent fertility has a causal effect on households economic wellbeing-an issue that has received considerable interest in development studies and policy analysis. However, only recently has the literature begun to give importance to adequate modelling for...

Using data from seven countries drawn from the Generations and Gender Survey, we study the relationship between informal childcare provided by grandparents and mothers’ employment. The extent of formal childcare varies substantially across European countries and so does the role of...

Young people leave the parental home at different ages, and differences exist both between and within societies. To explain this heterogeneity, differences in earnings and employment, education and family formation are popular candidates. Comparative research has emphasised the importance of...

Propensity Score Matching (PSM) has become a popular approach to estimation of causal effects. It relies on the assumption that selection into a treatment can be explained purely in terms of observable characteristics (the “unconfoundedness assumption”) and on the property that balancing on...

The aim of this paper is to assess the quality of the ranking of institutions obtained with multilevel techniques in presence of different model misspecifications and data structures. Through a Monte Carlo simulation study, we find that it is quite hard to obtain a reliable ranking of the whole...

We consider policy evaluations when SUTVA is violated because of the presence of interference among units. We propose to explicitly model interactions as a function of units characteristics. Our approach is applied to the evaluation of a policy implemented in Tuscany (a region in Italy) on small...