infonet-economy

Does universal preschool constitute an effective policy tool to promote the development and integration of children from minority groups? In the light of rising cross border migration and increasing ethnic variation in many developed countries, we address this question for the children of the Roma - the largest and most disadvantaged minority in Europe. To tackle the issue of non-…

The 2005 reform of the German welfare system introduced two competing organizational models for welfare administration. In most districts, a centralized organization was established where local welfare agencies are bound to central directives. At the same time, 69 districts were allowed to opt for a decentralized organization. We evaluate the relative success of both types in terms…

We study retail deposit withdrawals from commercial banks which were
differentially exposed to distress during the 2007-2009 financial crisis. We show that the propensity of households to withdraw deposits increases with the severity of bank distress. Withdrawal risk is, however, substantially mitigated by strong bank-client relationships. Considering the most distressed bank…

Die SVP-Familieninitiative schafft neue Ungerechtigkeit. Die faire Lösung wäre simpel: Der Abzug für die Fremdbetreuung von Kindern wird nur gewährt, wenn beide Eltern arbeiten.

This papers proposes a simple method for testing whether non-compliance in experiments is ignorable, i.e., not jointly related to the treatment and the outcome. The approach consists of (i) regressing the outcome variable on a constant, the treatment, the assignment indicator, and the treatment/assignment interaction and (ii) testing whether the coefficients on the latter two…

This paper demonstrates the identification of causal mechanisms of a binary treatment under selection on observables, (primarily) based on inverse probability weighting. I.e., we consider the average indirect effect of the treatment, which operates through an intermediate variable (or mediator) that is situated on the causal path between the treatment and the outcome, as well as the…

Sample selection and attrition are inherent in a range of treatment evaluation problems such as the estimation of the returns to schooling or training. Conventional estimators tackling selection bias typically rely on restrictive functional form assumptions that are unlikely to hold in reality. This paper shows identification of average and quantile treatment effects in the presence…