We characterize the relation between corporate asset structure and capital structure by exploiting variation in the salability of tangible assets. Theory suggests that tangibility increases borrowing capacity because it allows creditors to more easily repossess a firm’’s assets. Tangible...

A Direct Monte Carlo (DMC) approach is introduced for posterior simulation in the Instrumental Variables (IV) model with one possibly endogenous regressor, multiple instruments and Gaussian errors under a flat prior. This DMC method can also be applied in an IV model (with one or multiple...

Education is argued to be an important driver of the decision to start a business. The measurement of its influence, however, is difficult since it is considered to be an endogenous variable. This study accounts for this endogeneity by using an instrumental variables approach

Highly non-elliptical posterior distributions may occur in several econometric models, in particular, when the likelihood information is allowed to dominate and data information is weak. We explain the issue of highly non-elliptical posteriors in a model for the effect of education on income...

Education is a well-known driver of (entrepreneurial) income. The measurement of its influence, however, suffers from endogeneity suspicion. For instance, ability and occupational choice are mentioned as driving both the level of (entrepreneurial) income and of education. Using instrumental...

Exchange market pressure (EMP) measures the pressure on a currency

Exchange market pressure (EMP) measures the pressure on a currency to depreciate. It adds to the actual depreciation a weighted combination of policy instruments used to ward off depreciation, such as interest rates and foreign exchange interventions, where the weights are their effectiveness....

The validity of family background variables instrumenting education in income regressions has been much criticized. In this paper, we use data of the 2004 German Socio-Economic Panel and Bayesian analysis in order to analyze to what degree violations of the strong validity assumption affect the...

This paper estimates the health returns to education, using data on identical twins. I adopt a twin-differences strategy in order to obtain estimates that are not biased by unobserved family background and genetic traits that may affect both education and health. I further investigate to what...

How valuable is education for entrepreneurs’ performance as compared to employees’? What might explain any differences? And does education affect peoples’ occupational choices accordingly? We answer these questions based on a large panel of US labor force participants. We show that...