Planners often face the especially difficult and important task of assigning programs or treatments to optimize outcomes. Using the recent welfare-to-work reforms as an illustration, this paper considers the normative problem of how administrators might use data from randomized experiments to...

In this paper the motivation and various concepts of statistical systems for assisting case workers in assigning unemployed persons to active labour market programmes (ALMP) are examined and the particular implementation of such a statistical system in Switzerland, which was introduced in the...

The active labour market policies in Switzerland and Germany are compared. German and Swiss labour market policies have similar aims, instruments and experienced similar institutional reforms. In Switzerland, an informative administrative database for an evaluation of these policies was made...

Choosing among a number of available treatments the most suitable for a given subject is an issue of everyday concern. A physician has to choose an appropriate drug treatment or medical treatment for a given patient, based on a number of observed covariates X and prior experience. A case worker...

Choosing among a number of available treatments the most suitable for a given subject is an issue of everyday concern. A physician has to choose an appropriate drug treatment or medical treatment for a given patient, based on a number of observed covariates X and prior experience. A case worker...

Choosing among a number of available treatments the most suitable for a given subject is an issue of everyday concern. A physician has to choose an appropriate drug treatment or medical treatment for a given patient, based on a number of observed covariates X and prior experience. A case worker...

In this chapter, we present econometric and statistical methods for analyzing randomized experiments. For basic experiments, we stress randomization-based inference as opposed to sampling-based inference. In randomization-based inference, uncertainty in estimates arises naturally from the random...

This paper studies the problem of treatment choice between a status quo treatment with a known outcome distribution and an innovation whose outcomes are observed only in a finite sample. I evaluate statistical decision rules, which are functions that map sample outcomes into the planner’s...

This paper studies the problem of treatment choice between a status quo treatment with a known outcome distribution and an innovation whose outcomes are observed only in a representative finite sample. I evaluate statistical decision rules, which are functions that map sample outcomes into the...

The aim of the paper is to formulate and solve the following segmentation problem. Given is a population described by independent variables: X1, ... , Xn, (both continuous and categorical), the continuous dependent variable Y and the two-level categorical variable $\alpha$ with levels $\alpha =...