Recent studies that aim to estimate the causal link between the education of parents and their children provide evidence that is far from conclusive. This paper explores why. There are a number of possible explanations. One is that these studies rely on different data sources, gathered in...

Using American panel data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS:88) this paper investigates the effect of working during grade 12 on attainment. We exploit the longitudinal nature of the NELS by employing, for the first time in the related literature, a semiparametric...

This paper joins discussions on normalized regression and decomposition equations in devising a simple and general algorithm for obtaining the normalized regression and applying it to the Oaxaca decomposition. This resolves the invariance problem in the detailed Oaxaca decomposition. An...

This survey is devoted to the modelling and the estimation of reduced-form transition models, which have been extensively used and estimated in labor microeconometrics. The first section contains a general presentation of the statistical modelling of such processes using continuous-time...

The contingency table literature on tests for dependence among discrete multi-category variables is extensive. Existing tests assume, however, that draws are independent, and there are no tests that account for serial dependencies -- a problem that is particularly important in economics and...

We discuss methods for calculating multivariate normal probabilities by simulation and two new Stata programs for this purpose: -mdraws- for deriving draws from the standard uniform density using either Halton or pseudo-random sequences, and an egen function -mvnp()- for calculating the...

In this paper we describe an alternative iterative approach for the estimation of linear regression models with high-dimensional fixed-effects such as large employer-employee data sets. This approach is computationally intensive but imposes minimum memory requirements. We also show that the...

This paper compares the economic questions addressed by instrumental variables estimators with those addressed by structural approaches. We discuss Marschak's Maxim: estimators should be selected on the basis of their ability to answer well-posed economic problems with minimal assumptions. A key...

We investigate the problem of optimal choice of the smoothing parameter (bandwidth) for the regression discontinuity estimator. We focus on estimation by local linear regression, which was shown to be rate optimal (Porter, 2003). Investigation of an expected-squared-error-loss criterion reveals...

Currently available asymptotic results in the literature suggest that matching estimators have higher variance than reweighting estimators. The extant literature comparing the finite sample properties of matching to specific reweighting estimators, however, has concluded that reweighting...