Several studies show that young women start with lower wage expectations than men, even before entering the labor market and that this partly translates into the actual gender wage gap through effects on educational choice and the formation of reservation wages. Building on the theoretical...

Over the 2000s, many federal states in Germany shortened the duration of secondary school by one year while keeping the curriculum unchanged. Exploiting quasi-experimental variation due to the staggered introduction of this reform allows me to identify the causal effect of increased learning...

Several studies show that young women start with lower wage expectations than men, even before entering the labor market and that this partly translates into the actual gender wage gap through effects on educational choice and the formation of reservation wages. Building on the theoretical...

Over the 2000s, many federal states in Germany shortened the duration of secondary school by one year while keeping the curriculum unchanged. Exploiting quasi-experimental variation due to the staggered introduction of this reform allows me to identify the causal effect of increased learning...

This volume was prepared by Susanne Link during her stay at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich and the Department of Human Capital and Innovation of the Ifo Institute of Economic Research. It was accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Economics Departure of the University of Munich in...

This volume was prepared by Susanne Link during her stay at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich and the Department of Human Capital and Innovation of the Ifo Institute of Economic Research. It was accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Economics Departure of the University of Munich in...

A new and rapidly growing econometric literature is making advances in the problem of using machine learning (ML) methods for causal inference questions. Yet, the empirical economics literature has not started to fully exploit the strengths of these modern methods. We revisit influential...

A large and highly used number of treatment effects estimators rely on the unconfoundedness assumption ("selection on observables") which is fundamentally non testable. When evaluating the effects of labor market policies, researchers need to observe variables that affect both treatment...

Using a rich and unique combined administrative-survey dataset, this paper explores how sensitive propensity score (PS) matching estimates of Active Labor Market Policies (ALMPs) based on the selection-on-observables assumption are to typically unobserved covariates. Using a sample of German...

Many commonly used treatment effects estimators rely on the unconfoundedness assumption ("selection on observables") which is fundamentally non-testable. When evaluating the effects of labor market policies, researchers need to observe variables that affect both treatment participation and labor...