The assumption that the assignment to treatments is ignorable conditional on attributes plays an important role in the applied statistic and econometric evaluation literature. Another term for it is conditional independence assumption. This paper discusses identification when there are more than...

Since interventions by the public sector generally commit substantial societal resources, the evaluation of effects and costs of policy interventions is imperative. This paper outlines why program evaluation should follow well-respected scientific standards and why it should be performed by...

Large-scale environmental programs generally commit substantial societal resources, making the evaluation of their actual effects on the relevant outcomes imperative. As the example of the subsidization of energy-saving appliances illustrates, much of the applied environmental economics...

The need to evaluate the performance of active labour market policies is not questioned any longer. Even though OECD countries spend significant shares of national resources on these measures, unemployment rates remain high or even increase. We focus on microeconometric evaluation which has to...

The assumption that the assignment to treatments is ignorable conditional on attributes plays an important role in the applied statistic and econometric evaluation literature. Another term for it is conditional independence assumption. This paper discusses identification when there are more than...

A fast method based on coordinate-wise descent algorithms is developed to solve portfolio optimization problems in which asset weights are constrained by Lq norms for 1=q=2. The method is first applied to solve a minimum variance portfolio (mvp) optimization problem in which asset weights are...

Gram-Charlier expansions have became popular in Finance as an improvement over the normality assumption. The reason is that in Gram-Charlier expansions, parameters appear which directly control the skewness and kurtosis. Those expansions, of polynomial nature, have the unfortunate drawback of...

This paper shows which statistical techniques can be used to validate simulation models, depending on which real-life data are available. Concerning this availability, three situations are distinguished (i) no data, (ii) only output data, and (iii) both input and output data. In case (i) - no...

The tension between the meaning of causality in science and law or public policy is well-known; however, defendants in product liability cases or industries that might be affected by a government regulation may try to convince the fact-finder to require evidence of a causal relationship that...