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COVID-19 counterfactual evidence. Estimating the effects of school closures

School closure

Scholars have started to estimate the effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions to reduce the health impact of COVID-19.
However, the empirical evidence is highly contested, and since it is not known exactly what would have happened without those measures, political élites are left free to give credit to the voices that they prefer the most.
We argue that any sensible assessment of the effectiveness of anti-COVID policies requires methodological reflection on what is actually comparable, and how to approximate the ideal “method of difference” theorized by John Stuart Mill.
By evaluating the effectiveness of school closures as an anti-COVID policy, we provide two examples in which appropriate counterfactuals are inductively discovered rather than selected a priori. In the first one, we use Coarsened Exact Matching (CEM) in a cross-country setting, while in the second one, we implement the Synthetic Control Method in a within-country analysis. The article highlights the methodological advantages of including these techniques in the toolbox of policy scholars, while both examples confirm the effectiveness of school closures.

Marco Giuliani (2023) COVID-19 counterfactual evidence. Estimating the effects of school closures, Policy Studies, 44(1): 112-131, DOI: 10.1080/01442872.2022.2103527

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Voting between two global crises. A NUTS3-level analysis of retrospective voting in four South-European countries

Vote

Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain went several times to the polls during the 2010–2019 decade. It was a period characterised by the strenuous effort to recover the economic situation before the onset of the Great Recession; an effort, however, often constrained by externally imposed austerity policies, and by a refugee crisis that contributed to the growing salience of the immigration issue. The article adopts an original sub-national approach to examine if and how the economic situation and the incidence of immigration affected the electoral outcomes in the four South-European countries. Adopting a theory of retrospective behaviour, the research reported in the article confirms the association between employment and immigration levels, on the one hand, and punishment of the incumbent government on the other. However, the electoral effects of immigration are conditioned by the partisan composition of the government and, under centre-right cabinets, are aggravated by a negative economic conjuncture.

Marco Giuliani (2023). Voting between two global crises. A NUTS3-level analysis of retrospective voting in four South-European countries, Italian Political Science Review, 53(1): 68–84, DOI: 10.1017/ipo.2022.9

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What if? Using counterfactuals to evaluate the effects of structural labour market reforms: evidence from the Italian Jobs Act

The article assesses the impact of the Jobs Act, the labour market reform passed in Italy under Matteo Renzi’s cabinet in 2014–2015. In doing so, the study has a twofold aim. First, it contributes to the scholarly debate on labour market flexibilization, offering fresh empirical evidence about the debated effects of deregulatory reforms on employment performance. Second, our empirical investigation relies on an innovative approach, the synthetic control method, which allows us to estimate what would have happened if the Jobs Act had not been introduced. After the downturns of the Great Recession, the major goal of this flagship initiative was to boost overall employment performance while reducing labour market segmentation and enhancing more stable job opportunities for labour market outsiders, especially among younger cohorts and women. Comparing real-world observations for a number of key employment indicators with their estimated synthetic counterfactuals, we find that the Jobs Act did not fulfil its expectations. In line with part of the most recent literature addressing the impact of deregulatory reforms on employment performance, our results show that over the past five years no significant effects were driven by the reform, which may even have led to an increase in labour market segmentation.

Marco Giuliani & Ilaria Madama (2023) What if? Using counterfactuals to evaluate the effects of structural labour market reforms: evidence from the Italian Jobs Act, Policy Studies, 44(2): 216-235, DOI: 10.1080/01442872.2022.2039385

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