Recent research underscores the sensitivity of conclusions drawn from the application of econometric methods devised for quantitative outcome variables to data featuring ordinal outcomes. The issue is particularly acute in the analysis of happiness data, for which no natural cardinal scale...

How do house price changes affect the cost of living? The retail price index in the UK does not directly incorporate house price changes. Instead it uses mortgage interest to capture the cost of owning a home. This is a useful method from many perspectives. However, from a consumer welfare...

In this paper we develop a measure of current "expenditures" on housing services for owner-occupiers. Having such a measure is important for measuring the relative welfare of households, especially when comparing renters and owners and for measuring inflation. From a theoretical perspective...

We use archaeological data from ancient settlements of three different historical eras on a Greek island to construct novel measures of consumption. Using these, we show that luxury good consumption was higher closer to the center of nucleated settlements but shows no such pattern in a placebo...

Which housing characteristics are important for understanding homeownership rates? How are housing characteristics priced in the rental and owner-occupied markets? And what can the answers to the previous questions tell us about economic theories of homeownership? Using the English Housing...

This paper extends Imbens and Manski’s (2004) analysis of confidence intervals for interval identified parameters. For their final result, Imbens and Manski implicitly assume superefficient estimation of a nuisance parameter. This appears to have gone unnoticed before, and it limits the...

This paper studies nonparametric estimation of conditional moment models in which the residual functions could be nonsmooth with respect to the unknown functions of endogenous variables. It is a problem of nonparametric nonlinear instrumental variables (IV) estimation, and a difficult nonlinear...

We propose a test of the hypothesis of stochastic monotonicity. This hypothesis is of interest in many applications in economics. Our test is based on the supremum of a rescaled U-statistic. We show that its asymptotic distribution is Gumbel. The proof is difficult because the approximating...

Single equation instrumental variable models for discrete outcomes are shown to be set not point identifying for the structural functions that deliver the values of the discrete outcome. Identified sets are derived for a general nonparametric model and sharp set identification is demonstrated....

In this paper we develop procedures for performing inference in regression models about how potential policy interventions affect the entire marginal distribution of an outcome of interest. These policy interventions consist of either changes in the distribution of covariates related to the...