Background: Providing adequate medical care to nursing home residents is challenging. Transfers to emergency departments are frequent, although often avoidable. We conducted the complex CoCare intervention with the aim to optimize nursing staff–physician collaboration to reduce avoidable...

The discriminatory component of the gender wage gap was found to be significant and to decrease over time by previous studies, most of them based on the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition (OBD). Such evidence is disputable for being grounded on the assumption of full common support between men and...

The subprime crisis revealed that the adoption of suitable systems for the management of credit risk is of utmost concern. The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (2009) advises banks to use credit portfolio models with caution when assessing the capital adequacy. This paper investigates...

In this paper we examine the impacts on child health, using diarrhoea as the health outcome, (amongst children living in households) with access to different types of water and sanitation facilities, and from socio-economic and child specific factors. Using cross-sectional health survey data for...

A set-aside promotes a more equitable procurement process by restricting participation in government tenders to small or disadvantaged businesses. Yet its micro-effects on tender outcomes (competition and contract efficiency) and targeted firm performance entail trade-offs, which we evaluate...

In this paper, we study a general class of semiparametric optimization estimators of a vector-valued parameter. The criterion function depends on two types of in nite-dimensional nuisance parameters: a conditional expectation function that has been estimated nonparametrically using generated...

This study analyses the effects of public-sector-sponsored continuous vocational training and retraining in East Germany after unification with West Germany in 1990. It presents econometric estimates of the average gains from training participation in terms of employment probabilities, earnings,...

This paper estimates causal effects of two Polish active labor market policies – Training and Intervention Works – on employment probabilities. Using data from the 18th wave of the Polish Labor Force Survey we discuss three stages of an appropriately designed matching procedure and...

Many social experiments are run in multiple waves, or are replications of earlier social experiments. In principle, the sampling design can be modified in later stages or replications to allow for more efficient estimation of causal effects. We consider the design of a two-stage experiment for...

Propensity score matching estimators have two advantages. One is that they overcome the curse of dimensionality of covariate matching, and the other is that they are nonparametric. However, the propensity score is usually unknown and needs to be estimated. If we estimate it nonparametrically, we...