This paper illustrates that the generalized propensity score method can easily be applied with multiple continuous endogenous treatment variables. Consistency proofs carry over straightforwardly to this general case, and the approach is shown to work well in finite samples with various...

Rainfall is a truly exogeneous variable and hence popular as an instrument for many outcomes. But by its very nature, rainfall in nearby areas tends to be correlated. I show theoretically that if there are also spatial trends in outcomes of interest, this may create spurious correlation. In...

Nationwide health interventions are difficult to evaluate as contemporaneous control groups do not exist and before-after approaches are usually infeasible. We propose an alternative semi-parametric estimator that is based on the assumption that the intervention has no direct effect on the...

This paper illustrates that the generalized propensity score method can easily be applied with multiple continuous endogenous treatment variables. Consistency proofs carry over straightforwardly to this general case, and the approach is shown to work well in finite samples with various...

Nationwide health interventions are difficult to evaluate as contemporaneous control groups do not exist and before-after approaches are usually infeasible. We propose an alternative semi-parametric estimator that is based on the assumption that the intervention has no direct effect on the...

This paper investigates the robustness of determinants of economic growth in the presence of model uncertainty, parameter heterogeneity and outliers. The robust model averaging approach introduced in the paper uses a flexible and parsimonious mixture modeling that allows for fat-tailed errors...

Gravity models of international trade have been frequently applied to estimate the impact of common (official or spoken) language on bilateral trade. This study provides a meta-analysis based on 701 language effects collected from 81 academic articles. On average, a common (official or spoken)...

This paper studies Comprehensive Performance Assessment, an explicit incentive scheme for local government in England. Motivated by a simple theoretical political agency model, we predict that CPA should increase service quality and local taxation, but have an ambiguous effect on the efficiency...

Theoretical and empirical research in economics suggests that bilateral migration triggers bilateral trade through a number of channels. This paper assesses the functional form of the impact of migration on trade flows in a quasi-experimental setting. We provide evidence that the relationship is...

Three sources of strategic tax interactions among local jurisdictions are usually considered in the literature: public expenditure spill-over, tax competition and yardstick competition. However, another source has now been suggested: the intellectual trend. According to that hypothesis,...