We randomly vary religious identity salience in laboratory subjects to test how identity salience contributes to six hypothesized links from prior literature between religious identity and economic behavior. We find that religious identity salience makes Protestants increase contributions to...

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...

We measure the impact of individuals' looks on life satisfaction/happiness. Using five data sets, from the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and Germany, we construct beauty measures in different ways that allow placing lower bounds on the effects of beauty. Beauty raises happiness: A one...

We consider the classic problem of estimating group treatment effects when individuals sort based on observed and unobserved characteristics that affect the outcome. Using a standard choice model, we show that controlling for group averages of observed individual characteristics potentially...

Measurement of seat belt and air bag effectiveness is complicated by the fact that systematic data are collected only for crashes in which a fatality occurs. These data suffer from sample selection since seat belt and air bag usage influences survival rates which in turn determine whether a...

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 paper proposes an instrumental variables version of the Huber estimator as an alternative to the IV-Krasker Welsch estimator. The IV-Huber estimator is analytically and computationally much simpler than IV-Krasker Welsch. In the context of an empirical study of the importance of borrowing...

This paper documents the high level of job security protection in Latin American labor markets and analyzes its impact on employment. We show that job security policies have substantial impact on the level and the distribution of employment in Latin America. They reduce employment and promote...

In this paper, we make a first attempt to explore the relationship between computer use and productivity in French manufacturing and services industries. We match information on computer utilization in the work place collected at the employee level in the years 1987, 1991 and 1993, with...

This article examines the economic basis for what is termed %u201Crational discounting,%u201D which entails full recognition of policy effects over time and exponential discounting at a riskless rate of return. Policies often cannot be ranked unambiguously in terms of their present or future...