Nationwide health interventions are difficult to evaluate as contemporaneous control groups do not exist and before-after approaches are usually infeasible. We propose an alternative semi-parametric estimator that is based on the assumption that the intervention has no direct effect on the...

The low employment among people with disabilities in general, and mental disorders in particular, generates high costs to the society. This raises the need to develop effective vocational rehabilitation methods. Supported Education/Employment is effective in increasing sustainable employment for...

Disability insurance (DI) beneficiaries lose some of their benefits if their earnings exceed certain thresholds (“cash-cliffs”). When this reduction is too high, this implicit taxation of earnings is considered to be one of the prime reasons for the low outflow from DI. This paper analyzes a...

We conduct a field experiment to study if student counseling offices discriminate against disabled students based on their impairment. The offices receive randomized emails from fictitious high-school graduates, requesting information on the admission process and special accommodations to ease...

Many countries provide hiring subsidies aimed at promoting the employment of people with disabilities. The effectiveness of these subsidy schemes remains unclear. The subsidy lowers wages and may thus increase employment, but may also signal lower quality of the applicant (who has to disclose a...

Many instrumental variable (IV) regressions include control variables to justify (conditional) independence of the instrument and the potential outcomes. The plausibility of conditional IV independence crucially depends on the timing when the control variables are determined. This paper...

The origin of the obesity epidemic in developing countries is still poorly understood. It has been prominently argued that economic development provides a natural interpretation of the growth in obesity. This paper tests the main aggregated predictions of the theoretical framework to analyze...

It is widely believed that HIV is predominantly sexually transmitted in Sub Saharan Africa. This claim which is inconsistent with national representative data from Lesotho, Zimbabwe, and Swaziland, which reveals that a significant proportion of HIV infections occurred in adolescents who claim to...

Based on new, exceptionally informative and large German linked employer-employee administrative data, we investigate the question whether the omission of important control variables in matching estimation leads to biased impact estimates of typical active labour market programs for the...

We investigate the finite sample properties of a large number of estimators for the average treatment effect on the treated that are suitable when adjustment for observable covariates is required, like inverse pro¬bability weighting, kernel and other variants of matching, as well as different...