Scandinavian Working Papers in Economics

Working Paper Series,
IFAU - Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy

No 2019:18: Long-Run Effects of Dynamically Assigned Treatments: a New Methodology and an Evaluation of Training Effects on Earnings

Gerard J. van den Berg () and Johan Vikström ()
Additional contact information
Gerard J. van den Berg: University of Bristol
Johan Vikström: IFAU - Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy, Postal: Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy, P O Box 513, SE-751 20 Uppsala, Sweden

Abstract: We propose and implement a new method to estimate treatment effects in settings where individuals need to be in a certain state (e.g. unemployment) to be eligible for a treatment,treatments may commence at different points in time, and the outcome of interest is realized after the individual left the initial state. An example concerns the effect of training on earnings in subsequent employment. Any evaluation needs to take into account that some of those who are not trained at a certain time in unemployment will leave unemployment before training while others will be trained later. We are interested in effects of the treatment at a certain elapsed duration compared to “no treatment at any subsequent duration”. We prove identification under unconfoundedness and propose inverse probability weighting estimators. A key feature is that weights given to outcome observations of non-treated depend on the remaining time in the initial state. We study earnings effects of WIA training in the US and long-run effects of a training program for unemployed workers in Sweden. Estimates are positive and sizeable, exceeding those obtained by using common static methods, and suggesting a reappraisal of training.

Keywords: Treatment effects; dynamic treatment evaluation; program evaluation; duration analysis; matching; unemployment; employment.

JEL-codes: E24

79 pages, August 14, 2019

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