3rd Tinbergen Institute Conference: Microeconometric Analyses of Causal Relations in Development, Education, Family, Health and Labor Economics

May 22-24, 2008

In recent years substantial progress has been made in developing microeconometric techniques for investigating causal effects. The use of these microeconometric techniques to deal with selectivity and endogeneity problems has become particularly popular in development, education, family, health and labor economics. The aim of the conference is to bring together researchers in these areas that perform careful empirical analyses to investigate issues such as educational interventions, intergenerational mobility in health and educational outcomes, the relation between family, health and labor decisions and outcomes, the importance of early childhood conditions for outcomes during adulthood, and the impact of community level interventions in developing countries.

Presented and discussed papers:

• Wendy Janssens (VU University Amsterdam) – Selection bias in the measurement of HIV/AIDS prevalence in Namibia (with Jacques van der Gaag and Tobias Rinke de Wit)
• Petra Todd (University of Pennsylvania) – School voucher effects on education and labor market outcomes: evidence from Chile (with David Bravo and Sankar Mukhopadhyay)
• Paul Gertler (Berkeley) – Does money burn a hole in your pocket
• Jesse Rothstein (Princeton) – On the identification of teacher quality: fixed effects, tracking and causal attribution
• Guido Imbens (Harvard) – Dealing with limited overlap in estimation of average treatment effects
• (with Richard Crump, Joseph Hotz and Oscar Mitnik)
• Pieter Gautier (VU University Amsterdam) – Structural estimation of search intensity: do non employed workers search hard enough? (with Ronald Wolthoff en Jose Luis Moraga)
• Jean-Marc Robin (Paris School of Economics, Paris 1 & UCL) – Matching, sorting and wages (with Jeremy Lise and Costas Meghir)
• Pierre-Andre Chiappori (Columbia University) – Assortative matching on the marriage market: a structural investigation (with Bernard Salanie, Avi Tillamn and Yoram Weiss)
• Janet Currie (Columbia University) –The Effect of Fast Food Restaurants on Obesity (with Enrico Moretti and Stefano Della Vigna)
• Maarten Lindeboom (VU University Amsterdam) – Long-run Effects on Longevity of a Nutritional Shock in Early Life: The Dutch Potato Famine of 1846-1847 (with Gerard van den Berg and France Portrait)
• Elisabeth Sadoulet (Berkeley) – Local governance and efficiency of conditional cash transfers programs: Bolsa Escola in Brazil (with Alain de Janvry and Frederico Finan)
• Orazio Attanasio (University College London) – Efficient responses to targeted cash transfers (with Valerie Lechene)
• Martin Ravaillon (World Bank) – Are there lasting impacts of aid to poor areas?
• Geert Ridder (University of Southern California) – Instrumental variable estimation of nonlinear models with nonclassical measurement error using control variates(with Jin Hahn en Yingyao Hu)
• Martin Browning (Oxford) – Modelling dynamic discrete choice models with maximal heterogeneity
• Jaap Abbring (VU University Amsterdam) – Better safe than sorry? Ex ante and ex post moral hazard in dynamic insurance data (with P.A. Chiappori and T. Zavadil)
• Patrick Bajari (University of Minnesota) – An Empirical Analysis of Hospital/lnsurer Incentive Contracts (with Steve Tadelis of Berkeley and Robert Town of Minnesota)
• Dan Silverman (University of Michigan) – Sources of advantageous selection: evidence from the medigap insurance market
• Gerard van den Berg (VU University Amsterdam) – Structural empirical evaluation of job search monitoring(with Bas van der Klaauw)
• Chris Taber (University of Wisconsin) – Displacement, Asmmetric Information, and Heterogeneous Human Capital (with Luojia Hu)
• Edwin Leuven (University of Amsterdam)- Incentives versus sorting in tournaments: Evidence from a field experiment (with Hessel Oosterbeek, Joep Sonnemans and Bas van der Klaauw)
• Imran Rasul (University College London) – Family networks and school enrolment: evidence from a randomized social experiment (with Manuela Angelucci, Giacomo de Giorgi and Marcos Rangel)
• Holger Sieg (Carnegie Mellon University ) – The joy of giving and the greater joy of receiving: estimating a multiple-discrete choice models of voluntary local public good provision
• Phlip Oreopoulos (University of Toronto) – The Short- and Long-Term Career Effects of Graduating in a Recession: Hysteresis and Heterogeneity in the Market for College Graduates (with Till von Wachter and Andrew Heisz)
• Stephane Bonhomme (CEMFI Madrid) – Accounting for unobservables in comparing selective and comprehensive schooling
• Erik Plug (University of Amsterdam) – Estimating Intergenerational Schooling Effects: A Comparison of Methods(with Helena Holmlund and Mikael Lindahl)
• Mark Rosenzweig (Yale) – The Efficacy of Parochial Politics: Caste, Commitment, and Competence in Indian Local Governments (with Kaivan Munshi)
• Kaivan Munshi (Brown University) – The birth of a business community: tracing occupational migration in a developing economy

Organizing fellows: Jaap Abbring (VU), Hans Bloemen (VU), Gerard van den Berg (VU), Eddy van Doorslaer (EUR), Chris Elbers (VU), Pieter Gautier (VU), Jan-Willem Gunning (VU), Joop Hartog (UvA), Stefan Hochguertel (VU), Bas van der Klaauw (VU), Edwin Leuven (UvA), Maarten Lindeboom (VU), Petter Lundborg (VU), Hessel Oosterbeek (UvA), Erik Plug (UvA), Geert Ridder (USC).

Sponsored by the Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis , the Ministry of Economic Affairs, the Ministry of Finance and the Nederlandsche Bank .

The Conference was held in the Theater Instituut Nederland, Amsterdam, The Netherlands