We investigate the labour supply response to acute health shocks experienced in the postcrash labour market by individuals of working age, using data from Understanding Society. Identification exploits uncertainty in the timing of an acute health shock, defined by the incidence of cancer, stroke, or heart attack. Results, obtained through a combination of coarsened exact and propensity score ma...

The coarsened exact matching (CEM) method is used to match annual forest inventory plots awaiting remeasurement with plots that have already been remeasured. This results in a model-free approach for short term inventory projections. CEM has many desirable properties relative to other matching methods and is easy to apply within a SQL database. The combination of short term projections with a 3...

We introduce a new “Monotonic Imbalance Bounding” (MIB) class of matching methods for causal inference with a surprisingly large number of attractive statistical properties. MIB generalizes and extends in several new directions the only existing class, “Equal Percent Bias Reducing” (EPBR), which is designed to satisfy weaker properties and only in expectation. We also offer strategies to obtain...

Integrating housing tenure in Instrumental Motivation Theory predicts a tenure gap in electoral participation, as homeowners would be more motivated to vote compared with tenants. The empirical question is whether this effect is causal or rather due to selection into different housing tenures. This question is tackled using coarsened exact matching (CEM) on data for 19 countries, allowing us to...

The simplicity and power of matching methods have made them an increasingly popular approach to causal inference in observational data. Existing theories that justify these techniques are well developed but either require exact matching, which is usually infeasible in practice, or sacrifice some simplicity via asymptotic theory, specialized bias corrections, and novel variance estimators; and e...

Abstract A primary challenge for researchers that make use of observational data is selection bias (i.e. the units analysis exhibit systematic differences and dis-homogeneities due to non-random into treatment). This article encourages in acknowledging this problem discusses how – more importantly under which assumptions they may resort statistical matching techniques reduce imbalance empirical...

Abstract In 2002, the Finnish government introduced an earnings disregard experiment aimed at improving incentives of low-income individuals who receive last-resort social assistance. The aim was to reduce unemployment by providing assistance clients better least temporary or part-time work. This paper evaluates employment effects as event study using coarsened exact matching (CEM) and differen...