August 2002

IZA DP No. 543: Wages, Productivity, and Work Intensity in the Great Depression

published in: Southern Economic Journal, 2008, 75 (1), 91-103

This paper reviews the mains identification and estimation strategies for microeconomic 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-forconfounding- variables, difference-in difference, instrumental-variable, and regressiondiscontinuity 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.