This paper develops and applies a Bayesian approach to Exploratory Factor Analysis that improves on ad hoc classical approaches. Our framework relies on dedicated factor models and simultaneously determines the number of factors, the allocation of each measurement to a unique factor, and the...

Prior empirical research on the theoretically proposed interaction between the quantity and the quality of children builds on exogenous variation in family size due to twin births and focuses on human capital outcomes. The typical finding can be described as a statistically nonsignificant...

We investigate the relationship between social interaction and household finances using data from the British Household Panel Survey. We contribute to the existing literature by exploring the relationship between a wide range of aspects of household finances and social interaction, rather than...

Dynamic discrete choice models usually require a general specification of unobserved heterogeneity. In this paper, we apply Bayesian procedures as a numerical tool for the estimation of a female labor supply model based on a sample size which is typical for common household panels. We provide...

Children affect the after-birth labor force participation of women in two ways. Directly, the time spent in child-care reduces the labor market effort. Time spent out of the labor market while on maternity leave alters women’s participation experience and indirectly affects subsequent...

We use panel data from NLSY79 to analyze the effects of the timing and spacing of births on the labor supply of married women in a framework that accounts for the endogeneity of labor market and fertility decisions, the heterogeneity of the effects of children and their correlation with the...

Many governments wish to assess the quality of their universities. A prominent example is the UK's new Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2014. In the REF, peer-review panels will be provided with information on publications and citations. This paper suggests a way in which panels could choose...

In this paper we estimate the causal effect of children on the labor supply of women using panel data on women from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79). We examine the effect of children both prior to and after birth as well as how the effect of children varies with the...

We propose a Bayesian factor analysis model to rank the health of localities. Mortality and morbidity variables empirically contribute to the resulting rank, and population and spatial correlation are incorporated into a measure of uncertainty. We use county-level data from Texas and Wisconsin...

This paper describes a semiparametric Bayesian method for analyzing duration data. The proposed estimator specifies a complete functional form for duration spells, but allows flexibility by introducing an individual heterogeneity term, which follows a Dirichlet mixture distribution. I show how...