In an RDD study of the incumbency effect, observations somewhat away from the threshold separating winners and losers in an election are necessarily employed. We consider how incorporating the vote volatility of elections into a preferred index of electoral competitiveness or closeness, in...

This paper offers a meta-regression analysis of the literature on the drivers of financial development. Our results based on 1900 estimates suggest that institutional quality is positively correlated to both private sector credit and stock market capitalization (both as share of GDP). Domestic...

This paper proposes a quantile regression estimator for a heterogeneous panel model with lagged dependent variables and interactive effects. The paper adopts the Common Correlated Effects (CCE) approach proposed by Pesaran (2006) and Chudik and Pesaran (2015) and demonstrates that the extension...

In July 2004, the Belgian government intensified monitoring within the Unemployment Insurance scheme. Workers claiming unemployment benefits for more than 13 months are notified that past job-search behavior will be monitored 8 months later. In one region the target group is counselled shortly...

This paper proposes a linear categorical random coefficient model, in which the random coefficients follow parametric categorical distributions. The distributional parameters are identified based on a linear recurrence structure of moments of the random coefficients. A Generalized Method of...

This paper investigates the key factors affecting household energy expenditure in Egypt. Based upon the latest 2015 Egyptian HIECS Survey, we develop a quantile regression model with an innovative variable selection approach via Adaptive Lasso Regularization technique to untangle the spectrum of...

This paper is concerned with the problem of variable selection when the marginal effects of signals on the target variable as well as the correlation of the covariates in the active set are allowed to vary over time, without committing to any particular model of parameter instabilities. It poses...

We revisit the problem of estimating the local average treatment effect (LATE) and the local average treatment effect on the treated (LATT) when control variables are available, either to render the instrumental variable (IV) suitably exogenous or to improve precision. Unlike previous...

This paper is concerned with problem of variable selection and forecasting in the presence of parameter instability. There are a number of approaches proposed for forecasting in the presence of breaks, including the use of rolling windows or exponential down-weighting. However, these studies...

We demonstrate how mothers, fathers, and 15–17-year-old students alter their schedules around the K-12 academic year. Using regression discontinuity (RDD) methods, combined with dates on school year start and end dates by locality, we document several notable results. First, mothers are...