Naming and shaming in a fair way. On disentangling the inuence of policy in observed outcomes Soe J. Cabus yz Kristof De Witte x March 2012 Abstract Naming and shaming is a frequently applied incentive by supra-national organizations. Al- though common practice, a mere comparison between the outcome variable is meaningless. The observed outcome variable consists of two parts: (1) a part which is due to the general economic climate and where the policy maker does not have an inuence on; (2) a net part which is the direct result of policy interventions. This paper suggests a regression model to estimate the net policy outcome. The proposed linear panel data model accounts for short and long term economic inuences, as well as time and country xed e/ects. This yields an indication on the e/ect at- tributed to policy making. It is applied to early school leaving outcomes, which increasingly attract attention since recent policy actions stipulated in, e.g., the Lisbon Agenda or the No Child Left Behind Act. Despite Portugals best performance in the traditional naming and shaming model, once controlled for non direct policy inuences, the results indicate that Luxembourg and the Netherlands can be named, while Portugal and Spain should be shamed. Keywords: Naming and shaming; Benchmarking; Panel data model; School dropout Jel: J23, J24, C23 We are grateful to Wim Groot, Henriºtte Maassen van den Brink, Chris van Klaveren, Marton Csillag, Carla Haelermans, Markus Frolich and TIER seminar participants for useful comments, discussions and teaching. The authors acknowledge nancial support of NICIS. The usual caveat applies. y Top institute for Evidence Based Education Research, Maastricht University, Kapoenstraat 2, 6200 MD Maastricht, the Netherlands, s.cabus@maastrichtuniversity.nl. z Corresponding author. x Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Leuven (KUL), Naamsestraat 69, 3000 Leuven, Bel- gium, kristof.dewitte@econ.kuleuven.be; and Top institute for Evidence Based Education Research, Maastricht University, Kapoenstraat 2, 6200 MD Maastricht, the Netherlands, k.dewitte@maastrichtuniversity.nl. 1