August 2002

IZA DP No. 542: Programme Evaluation with Multiple Treatments

published in: Journal of Economic Surveys, 2004, 18 (2), 181-224

This paper reviews the main 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.