Many studies have estimated the effect of taxes on taxable income. To account for nonlinear taxes these studies either use instrumental variables approaches that are not fully consistent, or impose strong functional form assumptions. None allow for general heterogeneity in preferences. In this...

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...

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...

US voters have been moving apart in the last twenty years. This paper analyzes how their voting participation has partitioned by looking at US counties in the 2012 Presidential elections. To tackle this question, we propose a methodology that jointly addresses spatial autocorrelation of the...

How far is the world away from ensuring that every child obtains the basic skills needed to be internationally competitive? And what would accomplishing this mean for world development? Based on the micro data of international and regional achievement tests, we map achievement onto a common...

Using data from OECD's PISA, Eurostat and World Bank's WDI, we explore how child cognitive outcomes at the aggregate country level are related to macroeconomic conditions, specifically government education expenditures and early education experience. We find that both government expenditures in...

Although instruction time is an important and costly resource in education production, there is a remarkable scarcity of research examining the effectiveness of its use. We build on the work of Lavy (2015) using the variance of subject-specific instruction time within Switzerland to determine...

We exploit a recent state-level reform in Germany that granted parents the right to decide on the highest secondary school track suitable for their child, changing the purpose of the primary teacher's recommendation from mandatory to informational. Applying a disaggregated synthetic control...

This paper investigates the effect of a policy measure that gives secondary schools additional resources for low-ability pupils. Schools are free in deciding how to spend the additional money. I use a nonparametric bounds analysis to estimate upper and lower bounds on the effect of additional...