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The purpose of this article is to provide empirical evidence about the potential positive effects of switching from given non-reciprocal trade preferences granted under the Swiss Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) for developing countries (DCs) to negotiated reciprocal trade preferences under a Free Trade Agreement (FTA).

In a case study of Tunisia’s exports to Switzerland, the authors apply methods of matching econometrics, namely, Propensity-Score Matching and Nearest-Neighbor Matching. Hereby, they are able to identify the average treatment effect on the treated.

Overall preferential exports increased by 125 per cent after the entry into force of the FTA in 2005 until the end of the observation period in 2011. Additionally, an analysis of the agro-food and textile sectors likewise indicate boosting preferential exports in the amount of 100 per cent.

Case studies in this vein have their disadvantages. The greatest disadvantage is the lack of generalization. In contrast to studies estimating the potential effects of an FTA for several countries, the authors are not able to generalize their results based on a single case.

Because trade preferences under the Swiss GSP are offered to the country group of DCs as a whole, non-reciprocal trade preferences are not tailored to the export structure of a particular DC. By switching from non-reciprocal to negotiated reciprocal trade preferences, DCs such as Tunisia expect to negotiate terms which are tailored to their export structure as well as better conditions than competitors from countries which are still beneficiaries of the GSP.

To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to investigate explicitly the switch from non-reciprocal to reciprocal trade preferences using econometric matching techniques.

A discipline is bound by some combination of a shared subject matter, shared theory, and shared technique. Yet modern economics is seemingly without limit to its domain. As a discipline without a shared subject matter, what is the binding force of economics today? The authors combine topic modeling and text analysis to analyze different approaches to inquiry within the discipline of economics. The authors find that the importance of theory has declined as economics has increasingly become defined by its empirical techniques. The authors question whether this trajectory is stable in the long run as the binding force of the discipline.

In this chapter, we evaluate the employment effects of job-creation schemes (JCS) on the participating individuals in Germany. JCS are a major element of active labour market policy in Germany and are targeted at long-term unemployed and other hard-to-place individuals. Access to very informative administrative data of the Federal Employment Agency justifies the application of a matching estimator and allows us to account for individual (group-specific) and regional effect heterogeneity. We extend previous studies for Germany in four directions. First, we are able to evaluate the effects on regular (unsubsidised) employment. Second, we observe the outcomes of participants and non-participants for nearly three years after the programme starts and can therefore analyse medium-term effects. Third, we test the sensitivity of the results with respect to various decisions that have to be made during implementation of the matching estimator. Finally, we check if a possible occurrence of a specific form of ‘unobserved heterogeneity’ distorts our interpretation. The overall results are rather discouraging, since the employment effects are negative or insignificant for most of the analysed groups. One exception are long-term unemployed individuals who benefit from participation at the end of our observation period. Hence, one policy implication is to address the programmes to this problem group more closely.

This chapter is concerned with the estimation of spillover effects when outcomes arise as a consequence of bilateral interactions instead of from individual actions. In this type of environments, outcomes are generated on links instead of on nodes of a network, like bilateral prices in over-the-counter markets. The author proposes a link-based spatial autoregressive (SAR) model and discusses identification conditions and a two step least square estimation procedure. The author shows analytically that using a standard node-based SAR, which models nodes instead of links’ outcomes, produces misleading results when the data generating process is link-based. The methodology is illustrated using Monte Carlo experiments and real data from an interbank network.

In this chapter, we characterise the selection into parenthood for men and women separately and estimate the effects of motherhood and fatherhood on wages. We apply propensity score matching exploiting an extensive high-quality register-based data set augmented with family background information. We estimate the net effects of parenthood and find that mothers receive 7.4% lower average wages compared to non-mothers, whereas fathers gain 6.0% in terms of average wages from fatherhood.

The study aims to analyze the impact of market participation on small paddy farmers' income and consumption expenditure. The study also estimates various determinants affecting the market participation of smallholders. Further, the study computes the efficiency of different paddy marketing channels and identifies the determinants that impact the marketing channel selection of paddy growers in Eastern India.

The study used the propensity score matching (PSM) approach to measure the impact of market participation on farm income and per capita consumption. Further, the study employed Acharya and Aggarwal's composite index approach to estimate the marketing efficiency of various paddy marketing channels. Further, a multinomial logit model was used to determine the marketing channel selection constraints.

The outcomes indicate that market participation positively impacts farm income and consumption expenditure. Education, membership in farmers' organizations, price information and distance to the marketplace significantly affect farmers' market participation. The results show that the producer–retailer marketing channel is the most efficient compared to others. However, most paddy farmers sell paddy to farmgate collectors due to a lack of market information, vehicle ownership, storage system, and inability to take the risk of venturing out of the farmgate into markets.

The study uses primary data and captures only farmers' perspectives to measure the impact of market participation, marketing channel efficiency and determinants for market channel selection. The other stakeholder's perceptions can be included in future studies.

Rarely does any study identifies the efficiency of different marketing channels for paddy farmers in India and includes cognitive factors like risk perception and trust in buyers as constraints for market channel selection.

The purpose of this paper is to consider the enrolment at university and the subsequent possible dropout as a piece of the school-to-work transition and ask whether it improves or worsens the labour market outcomes a few years after graduation from the high school.

The analysis exploits data from the upper secondary graduate survey by ISTAT on a cohort of high school graduates and investigates the effect of dropping out four years after graduation. The labour market outcomes of university dropouts are compared to the outcomes of high school graduates who never enrolled at university. A propensity score matching approach is applied. The model is also estimated on the subsamples of males and females.

The findings show that spending a period at university and leaving it before completion makes the transition to work substantially more difficult. Both the probability of being NEET and getting a bad job increase in the case of dropout, while no relevant effect is found on earnings. Moreover, the impact of university dropout tends to be more harmful the longer the spell from enrolment to dropping out. Separate estimates by gender point out that females appear to be relatively more affected in the case of dropping out without a fallback plan.

While the existing studies in the literature on the school-to-work transition mostly focus on the determinants of the dropout, this paper investigates whether and how the employment outcomes are affected by dropping out in Italy. Moreover, university dropouts are compared to high school graduates with no university experience, rather than to university graduates. Finally, evidence on the mechanisms driving the effect of dropping out is provided, by considering timing and motivations for dropping out.

The authors propose an Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method for estimating a class of linear sum assignment problems (LSAP; the discrete case of the optimal transport problems). Prominent examples include multi-item auctions and mergers in industrial organizations. This contribution is to decompose the joint likelihood of the allocation and prices by exploiting the primal and dual linear programming formulation of the underlying LSAP. Our decomposition, coupled with the data augmentation technique, leads to an MCMC sampler without a repeated model-solving phase.

This paper estimates the financial returns to higher education quality in the UK. To account for the selectivity of students to institution, we rely on a selection on observable assumption. We use several estimates including the Generalised Propensity Score (GPS) of Hirano and Imbens, which relies on a continuous measure of institutional quality. This highlights that the returns to quality are heterogeneous and mostly driven by high-quality institutions. Moving from an institution in the third quality quartile to a top quality institution is associated with a 7% increase in earnings.

The purpose of the paper is to estimate the effectiveness of two start‐up programs (bridging allowance and start‐up subsidy) in East Germany.

Using a combination of administrative data from the Federal Employment Agency and a follow‐up survey (for roughly 1,300/1,000 participants/non‐participants), the analysis is based on the conditional independence assumption. Kernel matching estimators are applied to estimate the treatment effects and test the sensitivity of the results using a conditional difference‐in‐differences approach.

At the end of the observation period both programs are effective: unemployment rates of participants are lower, and employment rates and personal income are higher when compared to non‐participants. Additionally, first descriptive evidence of the additional employment effects through direct job creation is presented, which is quite significant for the bridging allowance and negligible for participants in the start‐up subsidy.

Participants in the start‐up subsidy are in their third year of participation at the end of the observation period and mostly still receive further support (although at a reduced rate). Therefore, the results for this program have to be treated as preliminary.

In contrast to other active labor market programs that have been evaluated recently (including job‐creation schemes and vocational training programs) this paper finds considerable positive effects for start‐up subsidies. Hence, programs aimed at turning the unemployed into entrepreneurs may be a promising strategy in East Germany.

This is one of the first studies that allows inferences to be drawn about the effectiveness of start‐up programs in East Germany. Most previous studies on the effectiveness of active labour market policies in the Eastern part of Germany neglected these programs.