One of the main objectives of empirical analysis of experiments and quasi-experiments is to inform policy decisions that determine the allocation of treatments to individuals with different observable covariates. We propose the Empirical Welfare Maximization (EWM) method, which estimates a...

This paper modifies the Wald development of statistical decision theory to offer new perspective on the performance of certain statistical treatment rules. We study the quantile performance of test rules, ones that use the outcomes of hypothesis tests to allocate a population to two treatments....

We use experimental data to disentangle signaling and budgetary effects of price on wine demand. The experimental design allow us to isolate in a simple and intuitive way the two effects. The signaling effect is present and nonlinear: it is strongly positive between EUR3 and EUR5, and...

Planners of surveys and experiments that partially identify parameters of interest face trade offs between using limited resources to reduce sampling error and using them to reduce the extent of partial identification. I evaluate these trade offs in a simple statistical problem with normally...

We separate the budgetary and non-budgetary effects of price on demand using choice data from wine tasting experiments in which consumers tasted wines of different quality accompanied by fictitious price information. The non-budgetary effect is present and nonlinear: it is strongly positive...

This paper studies the problem of treatment choice between a status quo treatment with a known outcome distribution and an innovation whose outcomes are observed only in a finite sample. I evaluate statistical decision rules, which are functions that map sample outcomes into the planner’s...

Using a panel of administrative Italian data (source: INPS), this paper provides new empirical evidence on the earnings mobility in Italy over a relatively long time period (1985-1996). Transition matrices have been used to document the extent to which Italian employees change their position in...

A higher job creation is a common result by many theoretical approaches trying to model marginal labor market reforms. In the framework proposed by Berton and Garibaldi [2006], in particular, the equilibrium arrival rate of temporary job offers is expected to be higher than the arrival rate of...

The liberalization of fixed term contracts in Europe has led to a two tier regime, with a growing share of jobs covered by temporary contracts. The paper proposes a matching model with direct search in which temporary and permanent jobs coexist in a long run equilibrium. When temporary contracts...