The evaluation of interventions such as active labor market policies or medical programs by means of a randomized controlled trial is often considered the gold standard. However, randomized experiments might face severe shortcomings especially if performed at the group level. One such problem is...

In the 1980s and 1990s, disability benefit rates in the Netherlands were among the highest in the world. However, since the beginning of this century the number of disability cases has dropped remarkably due to some very successful policy reforms. An administrative dataset of Dutch disability...

This paper presents a modeling framework for macroeconomic growth dynamics; it is motivated by recent attempts to formulate and study 'integrated models' of the coupling between natural and socio-economic phenomena. The challenge is to describe the interfaces between human activities and the...

This article introduces an innovative approach to the validation of empirical methods aiming at estimating capabilities. Validating these empirical methods is difficult because capabilities are not directly observable. We propose a computational model to generate data from a simulated society,...

We empirically assess the treatment effects of a place-based policy in Japan and propose a socially desirable and practically feasible treatment assignment rule for the program. To account for heterogeneity of treatment effects, we estimate the conditional average treatment effect for each...

We develop a novel approach integrating epidemiological and economic models that allows databased simulations during a pandemic. We examine the economically optimal opening strategy that can be reconciled with the containment of a pandemic. The empirical evidence is based on data from Germany...

We develop a novel approach integrating epidemiological and economic models that allows databased simulations during a pandemic. We examine the economically optimal opening strategy that can be reconciled with the containment of a pandemic. The empirical evidence is based on data from Germany...

A large literature examines the effect of health insurance on mortality. We add to this literature by emphasizing two challenges in using quasi-experimental variation provided by the Affordable Care Act (ACA) coverage expansions to study mortality. The first is non-parallel pre-treatment trends....

We examine how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted merchandise trade between and within Commonwealth countries. It uses bilateral trade data and a demand-driven short-term gravity model to (i) estimate trade losses, i.e. variations in intra- and extra-Commonwealth trade in goods from the...

This paper provides a new index of global macroeconomic uncertainty and investigates the cross-country transmission of uncertainty using a global vector autoregressive (GVAR) model. The index measures the dispersion of forecasts resulting from parameter uncertainty in the GVAR. Over the period...