Three Essays on Semiparametric Econometric Evaluation : Methods and Applications

Abstract

This dissertation consists of three stand-alone research papers on the semiparametric estimation of treatment effects. Treatment effects refer to the causal effect of a variable on an outcome variable of interest and the semiparametric estimation avoids the parametric assumptions on the outcome equation. The thesis is organized as follows: In the first chapter we analyze the effect of individual characteristics on the test score gaps between different Eastern European countries and Finland. Additionally, we look at the test score gaps between Eastern European counties. The second chapter analyzes the gender test score gap in a within country study for Turkey. In this chapter we evaluate the effect of individual characteristics, family characteristics and school characteristics on the gender test score gap. The third chapter deals with inverse propensity score weighting estimators and double robust estimators. In this chapter a new estimation procedure is developed, which allows to estimate the treatment effects with a lower mean squared error.