Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Administrative data are a valuable source of information in several ways for the design of an impact evaluation. Conditional on providing the information required for the evaluation, they feature major advantages: they cover the whole (sub)population of reference for their administrative purposes, and not just a sample of individuals; very often they extend over long time periods; they are not susceptible to the typical measurement errors of survey data; and, finally, they are free of charge. The case of the Italian , an Active Labor Market Policy (ALPM) to handle collective redundancies, illustrates how much empirical labor economics can benefit from having access to this kind of data. The accessibility of administrative archives for scientific purposes is a critical issue, as the history of this scheme demonstrates.

This chapter investigates the impact of negative home equity on job mobility. Panel fixed-effects estimation is carried out by making use of a Dutch administrative data set for the period 2006–2011. Endogeneity of home equity is taken into account by considering homeowners who fall underwater because of an exogenous price decline. They are compared with homeowners with positive home equity. Negative home equity has a moderate negative effect on the probability of changing jobs. If a household plunges into negative home equity, the head of the household is about 5.2% less likely to change jobs.

The role of microdata and policy evaluation has become more important over time at CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis. CPB’s value added is the focus on the Dutch context: the data, the underlying institutions and the research topics. This chapter provides four examples of microeconometric research at the CPB: labour participation of parents with young children, tax shifting by small corporations, teacher quality and student achievement and performance-based pay in mental health care. In these examples, CPB combines the strengths of structural models and policy evaluation models with large datasets. Next to this research, the importance of good communication strategies to policy-makers is emphasized.

This chapter provides new evidence on the effects of multisystemic therapy (MST), which is a social intervention for youth with conduct disorder problems. New data are provided on young people receiving MST in the years 2007–2011. Register data enable the construction of a comparison group of youth who are receiving alternative social treatments but who have similar parental characteristics and a similar life-cycle profile of previous social interventions and health-care use. It is found that MST participants are more likely than similar youth in alternative interventions to take primary school exams, and fewer MST participants with previous convictions are placed outside their homes. However, MST participants have lower upper secondary education completion rates and lower employment rates, are more dependent upon welfare income, and are more often convicted of crimes.

This study estimates the causal effect of retirement decision on well-being in Italy. To do so, the authors exploit the exogenous variation provided by the changes in the eligibility criteria for pensions that were enacted in Italy in 1995 (Dini’s law) and in 1997 (Prodi’s law, from the names of the prime ministers at the time of their introduction). A sizeable and positive impact of retirement decision is found on satisfaction with leisure time and on frequency of meeting friends. Furthermore, the results are generalized, allowing for the estimation of different moments from different data sources.

Using a regression discontinuity design and public educational administrative data for Chile, this chapter studies the impact of age at school entry on children’s outcomes. In contrast to previous studies, the authors are able to track this impact on school achievement over 11 years of the school life of a cohort of students. The results confirm previous findings that a higher age at entry has a positive effect on grade point average (GPA) and the likelihood of passing a grade, but also that this impact tends to wear off over time. However, we also find that this impact on school achievement is still present 11 years after a child has started school.

The purpose of this chapter is to document how widespread is, across Europe, the use of administrative data for counterfactual impact evaluations of active labour market policies. The analysis, based on published articles and working papers issued between 2000 and 2016, suggests that the interventions subject to counterfactual impact evaluations are unevenly distributed across Europe, with Germany and the Nordic countries being over-represented, while the opposite is found for East European countries. It is also found that counterfactual impact evaluations based on administrative data tend to (1) measure the effect of active labour market policies on several outcome variables, (2) estimate heterogeneous effects across subgroups and (3) examine short- as well as long-term impacts. In contrast, survey-based counterfactual impact evaluations are usually less comprehensive.

This chapter outlines how the impacts of a major vocational training programme can be evaluated with the use of linked administrative and survey data. To do so, it presents a strategy for future evaluations of Modern Apprenticeships in Scotland. Drawing on lessons from the existing literature, it describes the options and preferred choices for examined outcomes, data sources and evaluation approaches. It argues that future evaluations should focus mainly on individual employment and wages, and on firm productivity outcomes; they should rely mainly on existing administrative data and use two distinct control groups, consisting of non-participants and non-completers. The chapter also illustrates how the evaluator can use narrower control groups, matching techniques, regression analysis and changes over time to better identify causal effects.

The purpose of this chapter is to report how researchers in health economics and management have benefited from the linkage of several administrative datasets to measure the performance and analyse pay for performance schemes in primary care (PC) in England and in Italy (Tuscany Region). The chapter firstly addresses pay for performance schemes at international level, focusing on performance indicators, incentive schemes and data sources. Secondly, it focuses on the English Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF) and the Tuscany Region performance evaluation system (PES). In particular, it describes the impact of the QOF incentives to general practices (family medical surgeries) in improving chronic care conditions, measured through indicators of preventable emergency admissions. The chapter also describes how the PES for health care in Tuscany Region has been extended to the evaluation of primary care and discusses preliminary results in terms of improvements.

This chapter discusses the potential of systematic use of administrative microdata in policy research in Europe. It argues that their systematic and organised use can lead to substantial improvements in regulation and public investments, provided that some challenges are properly addressed.