Although it is well known that Markov process theory, frequently applied in the literature on income convergence, imposes some very restrictive assumptions upon the data generating process, these assumptions have generally been taken for granted so far. The present paper proposes, resp. recalls...

The Local Average Treatment Effect (LATE) interpretation of the IV estimates of the returns to schooling is becoming increasingly popular. Typically, researchers reporting LATE estimates do not provide systematic evidence that there is substantial heterogeneity across different ability levels in...

We characterize the bias of propensity score based estimators of common average treatment effect parameters in the case of selection on unobservables. We then propose a new minimum biased estimator of the average treatment effect. We assess the finite sample performance of our estimator using...

This paper identifies sharp bounds on the mean treatment response and average treatment effect under the assumptions of both concave monotone treatment response (concave-MTR) and monotone treatment selection (MTS). We use our bounds and the US National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to estimate...

Let (X1, Y1), . . ., (Xn, Yn) be i.i.d. rvs and let l(x) be the unknown p-quantile regression curve of Y on X. A quantile-smoother ln(x) is a localised, nonlinear estimator of l(x). The strong uniform consistency rate is established under general conditions. In many applications it is necessary...

This paper formulates and estimates multistage production functions for children's cognitive and noncognitive skills. Skills are determined by parental environments and investments at different stages of childhood. We estimate the elasticity of substitution between investments in one period and...

The recent literature on instrumental variables (IV) features models in which agents sort into treatment status on the basis of gains from treatment as well as on baseline-pretreatment levels. Components of the gains known to the agents and acted on by them may not be known by the observing...

This paper questions traditional approaches for testing the day-of-the-week effect on stock returns. We propose an alternative approach based on the closure test principle introduced by Marcus, Peritz and Gabriel (1976), which has become very popular in Biometrics and Medical Statistics. We test...

We investigate whether and to what extent multiple encompassing tests may help determine weights for forecast averaging in a standard vector autoregressive setting. To this end we consider a new test-based procedure, which assigns non-zero weights to candidate models that add information not...

In this paper we propose exact likelihood-based mean-variance efficiency tests of the market portfolio in the context of Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM), allowing for a wide class of error distributions which include normality as a special case. These tests are developed in the framework of...