The paper proposes and applies statistical tests for poverty dominance that check for whether poverty comparisons can be made robustly over ranges of poverty lines and classes of poverty indices. This helps provide both normative and statistical confidence in establishing poverty rankings across...

The recent literature on instrumental variables (IV) features models in which agents sort into treatment status on the basis of gains from treatment as well as on baseline-pretreatment levels. Components of the gains known to the agents and acted on by them may not be known by the observing...

This paper formulates and estimates multistage production functions for children's cognitive and noncognitive skills. Skills are determined by parental environments and investments at different stages of childhood. We estimate the elasticity of substitution between investments in one period and...

In this paper we discuss tests for residual cross section dependence in nonlinear panel data models. The tests are based on average pair-wise residual correlation coefficients. In nonlinear models, the definition of the residual is ambiguous and we consider two approaches: deviations of the...

I demonstrate that Ai and Norton's (2003) point about cross differences is not relevant for the estimation of the treatment effect in nonlinear "difference-in-differences" models such as probit, logit or tobit, because the cross difference is not equal to the treatment effect, which is the...

Asymptotic and bootstrap tests are studied for testing whether there is a relation of stochastic dominance between two distributions. These tests have a null hypothesis of nondominance, with the advantage that, if this null is rejected, then all that is left is dominance. This also leads us to...

This article considers non-unitary models of household behavior. These models suppose explicitly that households consist of a number of different members with preferences that are different from each other. They can be split up into two principal categories: cooperative (or collective) models,...

The identification of average causal effects of a treatment in observational studies is typically based either on the unconfoundedness assumption or on the availability of an instrument. When available, instruments may also be used to test for the unconfoundedness assumption (exogeneity of the...

We propose a specification test for a wide range of parametric models for the conditional distribution function of an outcome variable given a vector of covariates. The test is based on the Cramer-von Mises distance between an unrestricted estimate of the joint distribution function of the data,...

This paper considers testing the hypothesis that errors in a panel data model are weakly cross sectionally dependent, using the exponent of cross-sectional dependence α, introduced recently in Bailey, Kapetanios and Pesaran (2012). It is shown that the implicit null of the CD test depends on...