did china s tax for fee reform improve farmers welfare in rural areas abstract china enacted a rural tax reform the tax for fee reform tfr in the late 1990s a crucial but unanswered question is whether this reform improved farmers welfare in rural areas this article uses village level survey data from the chinese household income project in order to examine the effect of the tfr on farmers direct and indirect welfare we find no evidence that the direct welfare effects improved farmers net income in contrast the reform appears to have reduced the villages financing capacity and hence to have lowered their overall expenditures these indirect effects have had significant negative impacts on farmers welfare

long run effects of public sector sponsored training in west germany between 1991 and 1997 west germany spent on average about 3 6 bn euro per year on public sector sponsored training programmes for the unemployed we base our empirical analysis on a new administrative data base that plausibly allows for selectivity correction by microeconometric matching methods we identify the effects of different types of training programmes over a horizon of more than seven years using bias corrected weighted multiple neighbours matching we find that all programmes have negative effects in the short run and positive effects over a horizon of about four years however for substantive training programmes with duration of about two years gains in employment probabilities of more than 10 points appear to be sustainable but come at the price of large negative lock in effects

evaluating social policy by experimental and nonexperimental methods although it is important to establish causal relationships in social policy evaluation the effects are difficult to observe due to sample selection to evaluate the performance of estimators designed to handle sample selection bias we analyse data from a norwegian rehabilitation project with a randomised experimental design the data permit us to compare the performance of different nonexperimental estimators with the experimental results in our case study we find that nonexperimental evaluation based on sample selection estimators with selection terms that fail to meet conventional levels of statistical significance is highly unreliable the difference in difference estimator and propensity score matching estimators perform better in our context jel classification c51 j24 h43 i12

does inflation targeting improve fiscal discipline abstract we explore the performances of inflation targeting it adoption in terms of fiscal discipline fd while most existing studies focus exclusively on the role of fd as a precondition for it adoption using a sample of developing and developed countries we show that it adoption exerts a positive and significant effect on fd a result robust to a wide variety of alternative specifications in addition this effect is statistically significant only in developing countries a result that may fuel the current debate regarding the relevance of it adoption in general and particularly for developing countries

programme evaluation with multiple treatments this paper reviews the main identification and estimation strategies for microeconometric policy evaluation particular emphasis is laid on evaluating policies consisting of multiple programmes which is of high relevance in practice for example active labour market policies may consist of different training programmes employment programmes and wage subsidies similarly sickness rehabilitation policies often offer different vocational as well as non vocational rehabilitation measures first the main identification strategies control for confounding variables difference in difference instrumental variable and regression discontinuity identification are discussed in the multiple programme setting thereafter the different nonparametric matching and weighting estimators of the average treatment effects and their properties are examined download discussion paper pdf 484 kb

measuring the effect of subsidized training programs on movements in and out of employment despite over two decades of u s experience in operating large scale subsidized training programs for low income and unemployed workers the effects of these programs are still highly controversial the controversy arises from the difficulty of specifying the model of participant outcomes in the absence of training that is necessary in any nonexperimental program evaluation in this paper we suggest that some of these difficulties may be overcome by focusing on a very simple measure of outcomes namely the probability of employment we present a variety of estimates of the effect of training on the probability of employment for the 1976 cohort of adult male participants in the comprehensive employment and training act ceta program our methods range from a simple comparison of pre and post training employment probabilities between trainees and nonparticipants to a fully specified first order markov model of employment probabilities with individual heterogeneity there is consistent evidence across methods that ceta participation increased the probability of employment in the three years after training by from 2 to 5 percentage points classroom training programs appear to have had significantly larger effects than on the job programs although the estimated effects of both kinds of programs are positive we also find that movements in and out of employment for trainees and nonparticipants are reasonably well described by a first order process conditional on individual heterogeneity in the context of this model ceta participation appears to have increased both the probability of moving into employment and the probability of continuing employment

effectiveness of sequences of one euro jobs for welfare recipients in germany empirical evidence reveals that german welfare recipients often participate in multiple active labour market programmes almps however evidence on the effectiveness of almps exists mostly for single almp participations so far this article evaluates the sequential participation in almps for welfare recipients in germany based on comprehensive administrative data to control for dynamic selection that arises in the evaluation of sequences using a dynamic causal model and an inflow sample of welfare recipients the article analyses the effects of sequences of a public employment programme called one euro jobs on labour market outcomes for female participants in one euro jobs in the first period especially in west germany the results imply that participating in two consecutive one euro jobs compared with receiving only welfare benefits for two consecutive periods better facilitates integration into regular employment moreover taking part in a one euro job directly after entry into welfare receipt is

the value of corporate philanthropy during times of crisis the sensegiving effect of employee involvement recent research suggests that philanthropy s value to the firm is largely mediated by contextual factors such as managers assumed motives for charity our article extends this contingency perspective using a sensegiving lens by which external actors interpretations of organizational actions may be influenced by the way in which the organization communicates about those actions we consider how sensegiving features in philanthropy related press releases affect whether investors value those donation decisions for the empirical investigation in this study we analyze abnormal returns to announcements by u s fortune 500 firms documenting their donations to hurricane katrina disaster relief in 2005 we expect that in general donation decisions would be controversial given the uncertainty surrounding the hurricane s economic effects at the time however we also propose that announcements emphasizing employee involvement in the donation send investors positive signals about the firm s ability to bounce back from the disaster s adverse effects we find empirical support for the proposed hypotheses and discuss the implications for theory and practice

earnings losses of displaced workers revisited recent literature reviews conclude that job displacement results in sustained earnings losses bruce c fallick 1996 lori g kletzer 1998 and that estimates of the size of those reductions vary with the type of data used in the analysis the industry within which displacement occurs and business cycle conditions the largest estimated losses were obtained using administrative data from pennsylvania during the 1970s and 1980s louis s jacobson robert j lalonde and daniel g sullivan 1993a the data covered a period of high unemployment in a heavily indus trialized state characterized by disproportionate job losses in manufacturing thus the ability to generalize those results to more favorable economic times and states with a greater reliance on service sector employment has been questioned to address these issues administrative data are used to similarly examine the impact of job displacement on earnings losses of workers in connecticut from 1993 to 2004 the work of jacobson lalonde and sullivan jls also provided important methodologi cal advancement by adapting analytical techniques developed for program evaluation james j heckman and v joseph hotz 1989 to the context of job displacement the same techniques fixed effects and time trend estimators as those used in the original jls publication are initially employed here then the methods are extended to include matching estimators developed since their publication both nearest neighbor estimators of average treatment on the treated att and differenced average treatment on the treated datt are adapted to the context of this study heckman hidehiko ichimura and petra todd 1997 heckman et al 1998 and rajeev h dehejia and sadek wahba 1999 2002 the results presented here for connecticut differ in some ways from those found in the work of jls using data from pennsylvania in the period immediately following job loss regardless of the technique employed earnings reductions for workers displaced through mass layoff range from 32 percent to 33 percent jls reported immediate losses of more than 40 percent six years later using the same estimators as jls earnings reductions in connecticut range from 13 percent to 15 percent they report sustained losses in pennsylvania of 25 percent the smaller long term impacts in connecticut demonstrate that under more ordinary economic times esti mated losses from administrative data lie within the range observed using other data sources this finding resolves a long standing conflict among the results of high quality studies that have used differing data sources to study earnings reductions following job loss 1 using two different matching estimators earnings losses six years after mass layoff are 12 percent the matching estimators compare those who experienced mass layoff to compari sons with the same ex ante probability of the event these smaller losses are consistent with the

do wage subsidies increase employment in subsidized firms this paper examines whether subsidized jobs have contributed to employment in subsidized firms or have merely substituted for non subsidized ones the data set is an unbalanced panel of some 31 000 firms that are followed annually between 1995 and 2002 the analysis is based on difference in differences which is adjusted by regression and matching methods the results indicate that wage subsidies stimulate employment and that the magnitude of the effect is as aimed i also found that subsidies have no sizeable effects on non subsidized firms

earnings and employment effects of continuous off the job training in east germany after unification the effects of continuous off the job training oft for east germans after unification are analyzed in terms of their earnings and employment probabilities using the potential outcome approach to causality as general framework different matching procedures are suggested for the estimation they allow for permanent and transitory shocks that influence oft participation and labor market outcomes the matching procedures also take account of individually different starting dates the data are taken from the german socio economic panel gsoep 1990 1994 this dataset is very informative with respect to factors influencing the participation in training the results show no positive effects of training

evaluating the econometric evaluations of training programs with experimental data this paper takes the results of an employment and training program thatwas run as a field experiment in which the participants were randomlyassigned into a treatment or a control group and compares these results to the estimates that might have been produced by an econometrician who evaluated the program using the same econometric procedures that have been used in the program evaluation literature this comparison shows that many of these econometric procedures fail toreplicate the experimentally determined results and suggests that researchers should be aware of the potential for specification errorsin other nonexperimental evaluations copyright 1986 by american economic association

the relationship between r d collaboration subsidies and r d performance empirical evidence from finland and germany this study focuses on the impact of innovation policies and r d collaboration in germany and finland we consider collaboration and subsidies as heterogeneous treatments and perform an econometric matching to analyze r d and patent activity at the firm level in general we find that collaboration has positive effects in germany subsidies for individual research do neither exhibit a significant impact on r d nor on patenting but the innovative performance could be improved by additional incentives for collaboration for finnish companies public funding is an important source of finance for r d without subsidies recipients would show less r d and patenting activity whilst those firms not receiving subsidies would perform significantly better if they were publicly funded copyright 2007 john wiley sons ltd

evaluation of swedish youth labor market programs this paper evaluates two swedish active labour market programmes for youth namely youth practice and labour market training a non parametric matching approach is applied to estimate the average p

effectiveness of one euro jobs do programme characteristics matter recent german labour market reforms introduced a large scale workfare programme called one euro jobs to activate welfare recipients and improve their employment prospects in programme design leeway is left to regional actors using administrative data and propensity score ps matching this article investigates the association between programme design and effectiveness so as to provide insight on how to increase programme effectiveness first effects of different types of one euro jobs according to planned duration and weekly working hours compared to waiting are estimated second programme types are compared directly to disentangle selection and programme effects as expected lock in effects are larger for participations with a longer planned duration but not for those with longer weekly working hours one euro jobs do not generally increase the employment prospects for east german men beyond 2 years after programme start and longer and more intensive participations even decrease employment prosp

evaluating the impact of r d tax credits on innovation a microeconometric study on canadian firms this study examines the effect of r d tax credits on innovation activities of canadian manufacturing firms over the 1997 1999 period the federal and provincial r d tax credit programs were used by more than one third of all manufacturing firms and by close to two thirds of firms in high technology sectors we investigate the average effect of r d tax credits on a series of innovation indicators such as number of new products sales with new products originality of innovation etc using a non parametric matching approach compared to a hypothetical situation in the absence of r d tax credits recipients of tax credits show significantly better scores on most but not all performance indicators we therefore conclude that tax credits increase the r d engagement at the firm level and that the r d activities induced by fiscal incentives lead to additional innovation output

the behavioral relevance of mental accounting for the pricing of financial options abstract the paper reports an experiment on the pricing of financial options arbitrage free option pricing is tested against three hypotheses based on mental accounting the data show that even with considerable experience unexploited arbitrage opportunities persist subjects do not seem to make the connections between the different investment possibilities as essential for arbitrage free pricing afp instead they act as if they associate the risky assets to the same mental account while the bond is treated separately this corresponds to the construction of a two layer portfolio of a risky and a safe layer in the behavioral portfolio theory of shefrin and statman j fin quant anal 35 2000 127

job creation through public start up assistance this study examines the impact of german public start up assistance programmes administered by the deutsche ausgleichsbank dta on the performance of young firms the empirical analysis is based on firms from the zew entrepreneurship study that either received start up loans in one or more dta schemes or did not receive any funding from the dta at all the paper applies a non parametric matching approach often applied by labour market economists the interesting success measure is the average annual employment growth rate over a six year period and the resulting causal effect is the difference of this measure between the group of subsidized firms and the selected control group firms that did not receive any dta start up loans the empirical analysis shows that dta start up loans significantly improve the average employment growth rate

trade standards and poverty evidence from senegal summary in the debate on trade and poverty it is argued that standards act as trade barriers and cause marginalization of the poor this paper quantifies income and poverty effects of high standards trade and integrates labor market effects by using company and household survey data from the vegetable export chain in senegal we find that exports grew sharply despite increasing standards contributing importantly to rural incomes and poverty reduction tightening standards induced a shift from smallholder contract farming to integrated estate production altering the mechanism through which poor households benefit through labor markets instead of product markets

job machine think tank or both what makes corporate spin offs different one way through which knowledge and technology transfer can take place is through the foundation of new firms by former employees of incumbent private firms in this paper we examine whether knowledge transferred from the incumbent causally affect employment growth and post entry innovation activities of the new firm we focus on start ups for which a new idea a new product technology production process or management concept which the founder developed during her work as an employee was essential for setting up the new business these firms are denoted corporate spin offs using data from german start ups founded in the period from 2005 to 2008 we apply nearest neighbour propensity score matching we find that corporate spin offs outperform other start ups founded by former employees of incumbent private firms that are not based on an essential idea in terms of post entry innovation activities however we cannot show that corporate spin offs benefit from the transferred idea in terms of employment growth we conclude that a transferred idea is primarily an input factor and a stimulus for subsequent post entry innovation activities of corporate spin offs

do the skilled and prime aged unemployed benefit more from training effect heterogeneity of public training programs in germany this study analyses the treatment effects of public training programmes for the unemployed in germany based on propensity score matching methods we extend the picture that has been sketched in previous studies by estimating the treatment effects of medium term programmes for different skill and age groups our results indicate that programme participation has a positive impact on employment probabilities and earnings for almost all sub groups we find little evidence for the presence of heterogeneous treatment effects and the magnitude of the differences is quite small our results thus at least in part conflict with the strategy to provide training increasingly to individuals with better employment prospects

the effectiveness of qualification measures for employed workers an evaluation study for saxony this article investigates whether and to what extent employment policy measures co financed by the european social fund in germany meet their objective specifically it is analysed whether qualification programs for employed workers in the german state of saxony were effective in terms of employment protection to this end a control function approach is implemented which utilizes a unique firm level dataset this model explicitly accounts for unobserved heterogeneity between participating and nonparticipating companies by modelling the participation decision process our results suggest a positive effect of program participation however this positive treatment effect varies considerably across different sub groups of the treatment as well as the comparison group

a microeconometric evaluation of the active labour market policy in switzerland in the second part of the 1990 s switzerland conducted an ambitious active labour market policy almp encompassing a wide variety of programmes we evaluate the effects of these programmes on the individual employment probability of potential participants our econometric analysis uses unusually informative data origi nating from administrative unemployment and social security records we apply a matching es timator adapted for the case of multiple programmes we find substantial positive effects for one particular programme that is a unique feature of the swiss almp it consists of a wage subsidy for temporary jobs in the regular labour market that would otherwise not be taken up by the unemployed we also find large negative effects for traditional employment programmes oper ated in sheltered labour markets for training courses the results are mixed doi 10 1111 1468 0297 00072 download internet appendix pdf 2 590 kb

discretionary ratings and the pricing of subprime mortgage backed securities using a dataset of home equity loan securities issued up to june 2007 and rated by moody s and or sp however these alternative thresholds do not appear to play a role as relevant as that of the ig sg boundary rating bias is also found to have an asymmetric impact on spreads the relevance of actual over expected ratings is greater for tranches receiving evaluations that are higher rather than lower than expected taken together these pieces of empirical evidence point toward ratings based regulation as an important explanation for the observed mispricing of structured finance products

the effectiveness of public sponsored training revisited the importance of data and methodological choices this article revisits the effectiveness of public sponsored training programs for germany accounting for dynamic selection into heterogeneous programs we carefully assess to what extent various aspects of our empirical strategy such as conditioning flexibly on employment and benefit histories the availability of rich data handling of later program participations and further methodological choices affect our estimates our results imply pronounced negative lock in effects in the short run and positive medium run effects on employment and earnings when job seekers enroll after having been unemployed for some time we find that data and specification issues can have a large effect

is labour market training a curse for the unemployed evidence from a social experiment summary in 1994 a social experiment was conducted in denmark where unemployed applicants for classroom training were randomised into treatment and control groups the data are contaminated by the presence of no shows and crossovers biasing the traditional experimental estimator we interpret our experiment within an economic model of agents maximising outcomes facing different cost regimes and present results interpretable within this model surprisingly we find that classroom training significantly increases individual unemployment rates and decreases employability we discuss possible reasons for this finding and some related policy issues copyright 2009 john wiley sons ltd this paper uses data from a social experiment to evaluate the impact of classroom training on the subsequent fraction of time individuals spend in unemployment and in employment and on their wages in doing so we exploit the information from one among only a handful of social experiments conducted in europe on labour market issues social experiments are seen by many as the way to consistently estimate the effect of a policy on an outcome variable of interest the trick is to randomise the selection process itself such that the outcomes in the control group can be used as an estimate of the unobserved counterfactual in this case the outcome of trained individuals in the absence of training however experimental data are often flawed as is the case in the experiment studied in this paper in the present study the data are contaminated by the presence of no shows members of the treatment group who do not show up at the course they signed up for and crossovers members of the control group who end up receiving the treatment they were randomised out of the presence of no shows crossovers and also drop outs is a well known phenomenon in social experiments see heckman et al 1998b 2000 neglecting their presence may seriously bias the estimates of the parameter of interest simply because they constitute the very phenomenon that the experiment is designed to eliminate namely non random selection 1 in the experiment studied in this paper only 52 of