infonet-economy

Not available in German. Recently several studies analysed active labour market policies using a newly proposed matching estimator for multiple programmes. Since there is only very limited practical experience with this estimator, this paper checks its sensitivity with respect to issues that are of practical importance. The estimator turns out to be fairly robust to several matters that concern its implementation. Furthermore, the paper demonstrates that the matching approach per se is no magic bullet solving all problems of evaluation studies, but that its success depends critically on the information available in the sample. Finally, a comparison with a bootstrap distribution provides some justification for using a simplified approximation of the distribution of the estimator that ignores its sequential nature.