Microeconometric Evaluation of Labour Market Policies
This study was accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of E- nomics of the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University in Frankfurt/Main. It was undertaken within the research project 'The Efects of Job Creation and Structural Adjustment Schemes on the Participating Individuals', which was conducted by the Institute of Statistics and Econometrics (Empirical E- nomic Research) in cooperation with the Institute for Employment Research in Nuremberg.
Evaluating the Employment Effects of Job Creation Schemes in Germany
This book analyses the employment effects of job creation schemes for the participating individuals in Germany. Programmes provide subsidised jobs that are additional in nature and of value for society to hard-to-place individuals. International evidence on the effectiveness suggests that programmes should be targeted to the needs of the unemployed and should be offered early in the unemployment spell. Both questions are studied for job creation schemes in Germany. In the empirical analysis, propensity score matching methods extended to the dynamic setting are applied to administrative data of the Federal Employment Agency.
Design of Observational Studies
This book introduction to statistical inference in observational studies and a detailed discussion of the principles that guide the design of observational studies. An observational study is an empiric investigation of effects caused by treatments when randomized experimentation is unethical or infeasible. Observational studies are common in most fields that study the effects of treatments on people, including medicine, economics, epidemiology, education, psychology, political science and sociology. The quality and strength of evidence provided by an observational study is determined largely by its design. Design of Observational Studies is organized into five parts. Chapters 2, 3, and 5 of Part I cover concisely many of the ideas discussed in Rosenbaum’s Observational Studies. Part II discusses the practical aspects of using propensity scores and other tools to create a matched comparison that balances many covariates, and includes an updated chapter on matching in R. In Part III, the concept of design sensitivity is used to appraise the relative ability of competing designs to distinguish treatment effects from biases due to unmeasured covariates. Part IV discusses evidence factors and the computerized construction of more than one comparison group. Part V discusses planning the analysis of an observational study, with particular reference to Sir Ronald Fisher’s striking advice for observational studies: "make your theories elaborate."


