A DISTRIBUTIONAL ANALYSIS OF TREATMENT EFFECTS IN RANDOMIZED EXPERIMENTS

This paper considers statistical tests that can be used to identify if a treatment is effective for a specific outcome variable over the entire distribution of a treated group when it is compared with a control group's distribution. Using only the average treatment effect to evaluate specific treatment programs ignores what happens in different regions of the distribution of interest. To address this problem, tests of equality of distributions, first and second order stochastic dominance are employed. To show how to implement the tests easily, an outline on how to estimate critical values using bootstrap method is presented. The tests are then applied to analyze the effectiveness of a treatment in a randomized experiment.Stochastic dominance tests

Elections, Economic Outcomes and Policy in Canada: 1870 - 2015

In this paper we examine the relationship between economic and electoral outcomes in Canada since Confederation (1867) and the role that economic policy has played in influencing this relationship. The results are consistent with voter concern for the overall performance of the economy in the incumbent’s governing term—the average growth rate of per capita GDP and average unemployment rate—while rejecting the presence of a political business/budget cycle response in the period leading into an upcoming election. Ev

A distributional analysis of treatment effects in randomized experiments

This paper considers statistical tests that can be used to identify if a treatment is effective for a specific outcome variable over the entire distribution of a treated group when it is compared with a control group's distribution. Using only the average treatment effect to evaluate specific treatment programs ignores what happens in different regions of the distribution of interest. To address this problem, tests of equality of distributions, first and second order stochastic dominance are employed. To show how to implement the tests easily, an outline on how to estimate critical values using bootstrap method is presented. The tests are then applied to analyze the effectiveness of a treatment in a randomized experiment

Identifying Extreme Values of Exchange Market Pressure

This paper contributes to the existing literature on dating currency crisis in three ways. First, we combine the Monte Carlo simulation with a modified Hill’s estimator method to obtain more robust results and efficiently deal with bias variance tradeoff in identifying extreme values. Second, we propose a systematic way to choose the reference country in building the Exchange Market Pressure index rather than arbitrary or descriptive reasoning. Third, different data frequencies are applied and the results are evaluated. Our finding suggests that higher frequency data are more appropriate while applying Extreme Value Theory. It urges researchers to be more cautious in applying EVT and interpreting tail incidences that are obtained from lower frequency data

Youth Training Programs and their Impact on Career and Spell Duration of Professional Soccer Players

A unique data set of post-war English trained soccer players that signed professionally with their parent club when they turned 18 is used to study the impact of their stay with the home team and their total career duration. The home team (first) spell and career durations of these soccer players in a top European leagues is modeled using robust hazard models. The results of the analysis show that players that start their professional careers after acquiring training in competitive youth academy/programs have different outcomes on their career and first spell duration depending on the clubs they start their training. The first spell duration analysis is performed to estimate the bond or loyalty factor established by clubs with their youth trainees. The spell analysis outlines the nature of the competitive environment in which smaller clubs have a chance to keep up with the larger ones in terms of producing and holding on to home- grown talent. This would be a necessary condition for them to remain competitive in light of their lagging financial resources that limit their activity and ability to attract top talent in the soccer transfer market. The analysis of career duration in the top European leagues will show the success of a specific academy's training programs in producing players competitive in top soccer leagues. Finally, the results of both analyses were tested for endogeneity bias using a split sample test

Duration Dependence in Employment: Evidence from the Last Half of the 20th Century

This paper extends the investigation of Ignaczak [5] of the first employment spell of workers across five different birth cohorts using pooled data from the 15th and 20th cycles of the Canadian General Social Survey (GSS) to subsequent spells of employment with the purpose of testing for employment duration dependence. As the information on the GSS surveys spans well over the last half of the 20th century we are able to test not only the potential duration dependence but its stability over time. This paper contributes to the debate of employment stability by analyzing the differences between job and employment durations and showing that successive cohorts of workers have had increasingly shorter first employment durations. The analysis finds cohort effects which play a signiffcant role in explaining declining employment tenure. The cohort effects can be seen as a proxy for a number of socio-economic factors that affect the hazard of separation from employment. Separate analysis is completed for men and women by birth cohort. This pattern of declining tenure has occurred for both men and women, but the decline has been far more prominent for men. For men, macroeconomic factors affect the hazard more strongly in more recent cohorts, which is consistent with recessionary periods generating decreasing employment stability across cohorts. For women, cohort effects are consistent with the increasing generosity of maternity leave provisions through Unemployment Insurance

The Threat of Domestic Violence and Women's Empowerment: The Case of West Africa

This paper assesses the significance of a set of threats of domestic violence in ten West African countries that arguably limit the potential of women in particular and the development of society. The data consists of the most recent year of a country-specific Demographic and Health Survey (DHS), conducted in the same way for each participating country. The risk of domestic violence and the intensity of its threat are assessed using different probabilistic model specifications together with an assessment of how heterogeneous/homogenous are these effects across the set of countries. The overall results suggest that religion has played a significant role in relation to domestic violence in most countries, the exceptions being Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger. Area of residence (rural) has played an important positive role in Benin, Ghana, Guinea, Senegal and Sierra Leone. The lack of education increases the threat in Benin, Burkina, Ghana, Liberia and Nigeria. The level of well-being and/or household’s level of wealth have a significant negative impact on the threat of domestic violence in Benin, Ghana, Nigeria, and Senegal. The factor that defines the improvement in wife’s social status which is characterized in the sample by the wife’s higher level of education has been also important in reducing the threat of domestic violence in Benin, Ghana and Senegal. Finally, out of the ten countries, a married female it is at the highest risk of violence in Guinea and at the lower risk in Ghana(except for the wives living in rural areas)

A Nonparametric Analysis Of Canadian Employment Patterns

Popular perception holds that employment stability has decreased in recent decades. However, no conclusive evidence exists on secular declines in the length of jobs held. Furthermore, most studies conclude that the proportion of long term jobs has remained remarkably stable over the last few decades. To shed light on this discrepancy we use distribution analysis to systematically track changes in Canadian employment durations over an extended period. This is done in order to reconcile popular perception with recent studies and nest the existing literature in a broader historical context. Using finite mixture decomposition on successive cohorts of workers starting from the 1950s we identify worker types within cohort-based distributions. Then, using tests of stochastic dominance, we show that the distribution of employment has indeed changed. The finite mixture decomposition reveals that earlier cohorts were more likely to have longer tenure than later cohorts and that there are shifts in pro-portions between longer and shorter work episodes. Our results also indicate that after the 1960s employment durations declined sharply for men, while for women the results were mixed

Duration Dependence in Employment: Evidence from the Last Half of the 20th Century

This paper extends the investigation of Ignaczak [5] of the first employment spell of workers across five different birth cohorts using pooled data from the 15th and 20th cycles of the Canadian General Social Survey (GSS) to subsequent spells of employment with the purpose of testing for employment duration dependence. As the information on the GSS surveys spans well over the last half of the 20th century we are able to test not only the potential duration dependence but its stability over time. This paper contributes to the debate of employment stability by analyzing the differences between job and employment durations and showing that successive cohorts of workers have had increasingly shorter first employment durations. The analysis finds cohort effects which play a significant role in explaining declining employment tenure. The cohort effects can be seen as a proxy for a number of socio-economic factors that affect the hazard of separation from employment. Separate analysis is completed for men and women by birth cohort. This pattern of declining tenure has occurred for both men and women, but the decline has been far more prominent for men. For men, macroeconomic factors affect the hazard more strongly in more recent cohorts, which is consistent with recessionary periods generating decreasing employment stability across cohorts. For women, cohort effects are consistent with the increasing generosity of maternity leave provisions through Unemployment Insurance