Chiara Colagiacomo, Elena Ragazzi (p), Lisa Sella, Stefano Signorini

Lisa Sella

The European Agency for Health and Safety at Work (2013) underlines that the development and implementation of OSH interventions, including policies, programs and their effects, are not evaluated by means of rigorous and scientific evidence-based research, denoting a general lack of quality in OSH intervention.
In this panorama, the Italian case is particularly interesting. In 2008, a system of economic incentives has been introduced (d.lgs. 81/2008, art. 11), which assigns to various public entities the provision of grants addressed to small, medium and micro enterprises (SMEs) that realize investment projects in the field of health and safety at work. The most important intervention, in terms of both the number of beneficiaries and the provided amounts, has been realized by Inail. Since 2010, Inail has financed OSH projects for about 2 billion euros, which go under the name of "ISI calls".
Up to now, the evaluation analyses performed by Inail on the ISI calls mainly concerned implementation processes and performance monitoring, reporting, and accounting. Recently, the need for an ex-post evaluation of the effects emerged, in order to improve the policy effectiveness. Therefore, Inail intends to plan a research aimed at identifying the appropriate models to assess the impact of the incentives and to highlight their strengths and criticalities as an economic support to SMEs.
This paper overviewes the main theoretical and methodological aspects in the counterfactual evaluation of OSH policies. This overview is fundamental because the topic is not sufficiently addressed by both national and international literature, while studies on this topic are not so widespread. In particular, we reflect on: the possible evaluation questions that emerge when studying the impacts of OSH policies and their implications; the most appropriate evaluation designs that could answer the evaluation questions; and the consequent methodological issues (e.g., internal and external validity, feasibility of an evaluation based on administrative data, etc.).

Eva Dettmann (p), Antje Weyh

Lisa Sella

In Germany, various policy instruments exist to support the settlement and expansion of firms and the job creation in disadvantaged regions, and large amounts of money are spend every year. Repeated negative headlines about international ’subsidy grasshoppers’ suggest a large risk of deadweight effects and cast doubt on the suitability of the instruments.
The aim of this study is to analyze long-term effects of the largest place-based policy in Germany. Essentially we analyze if supported establishments ’survive’ the expiry of a commitment period associated with the subsidy, and if the positive short and mid-term (employment) effects of investment subsidies found in many recent studies are persistent – or at least are still there if the commitment period for the subsidized jobs is expired. A closer look at the employment development will allow first presumptions about the motivation of firms when applying for investment subsiedies. And it will give a first hint, if the policy instrument is suitable for supporting economic development in disadvantaged regions in the long run.
We see three special challenges for the analysis: First, the treatment can start basically at every time and treated firms have different treatment durations. Second, our observation period is characterized by a real dynamic economic development due to the financial crisis. Third, a comparatively long observation period is required; besides the pre-treatment time to consider the common trend assumption and the whole treatment period, the post-treatment time must cover at least the whole commitment period of 5 years.
We base the analysis on monthly data and use a flexible conditional difference-in-differences approach that enables us to consider individual treatment phases for every treated firm and to exactly define the time when the commitment period of 5 years of is over. Our observation period for every firm lasts at least 61 months after the treatment is finished.

Marco Mariani (p), Chiara Bocci, Alessandra Mattei, Fabrizia Mealli

Lisa Sella

Marginal structural models (MSMs) enjoy wide popularity with methodological and applied scholars. Under appropriate sequential ignorability assumptions that address the issue of dynamic confounding, MSMs allows to analyze longitudinal, observational studies characterized by repeated treatment over time and to recover the causal effects of the treatment sequences of interest. Surprisingly, the approach based on MSM has not yet been generalized to settings with longitudinal, multivalued treatments, e.g. with multiple discrete or even continuous treatments. Our paper aims to start to fill the gap. We generalize the assumptions needed to identify causal effects in longitudinal settings characterized by the possibility of the repeated intake of multiple discrete treatments. We adopt a MSM approach and we show how the effects of interest can be estimated using inverse-probability-of-treatment weighting. We apply our approach to the analysis of a real Italian case study of export promotion policy. The program consists of the provision of multiple services and aids by specialized agencies, including consultancy, support to the participation in international fairs and business-to-business meetings, of which firms can take advantage either simultaneously or at different moments in time.