This essay reviews progress in empirical economics since Leamer's (1983) critique. Leamer highlighted the benefits of sensitivity analysis, a procedure in which researchers show how their results change with changes in specification or functional form. Sensitivity analysis has had a salutary but...

This paper considers the implications of the permanent/transitory decomposition of shocks for identification of structural models in the general case where the model might contain more than one permanent structural shock. It provides a simple and intuitive generalization of the influential work...

Bivariate duration data frequently arise in economics, biostatistics and other areas. In "bivariate frailty models", dependence between the frailties (i.e., unobserved determinants) induces dependence between the durations. Using notions of quadrant dependence, we study restrictions that this...

The common approach to evaluating a model in the structural VAR literature is to compare the impulse responses from structural VARs run on the data to the theoretical impulse responses from the model. The Sims-Cogley-Nason approach instead compares the structural VARs run on the data to...

The central finding of the recent structural vector autoregression (SVAR) literature with a differenced specification of hours is that technology shocks lead to a fall in hours. Researchers have used this finding to argue that real business cycle models are unpromising. We subject this SVAR...

We propose a method to identify bounds (i.e. set identification) on the sharing rule for a general collective household consumption model. Unlike the effects of distribution factors, it is well known that the level of the sharing rule cannot be uniquely identified without strong assumptions on...

The correlation between instruments and explanatory variables is a key determinant of the performance of the instrumental variables estimator. The R-squared from regressing the explanatory variable on the instrument vector is a useful measure of relevance in univariate models, but can be...

The empirical literature on contagion has mainly measured the propagation of shocks across countries using daily stock markets, interest rates, and exchange rates. Several methodologies have been used for this purpose, however, the properties of the data introduces important limitations on the...

We examine the effect of survey measurement error on the empirical relationship between child mental health and personal and family characteristics, and between child mental health and educational progress. Our contribution is to use unique UK survey data that contains (potentially biased)...

We use panel data from the US Health and Retirement Study 1992-2002 to estimate the effect of self-assessed health limitations on active labor market participation of men around retirement age. Self-assessments of health and functioning typically introduce an endogeneity bias when studying the...