The literature on happiness shows that there are many factors that influence a person s happiness. Extending previous studies, we investigate the role of the freedom of choice as a key contributing construct in influencing a person s happiness. We define two hypothetical sub-constructs for the...

Many microeconometric models of discrete labour supply include alternative-specific constants meant to account for (possibly besides other factors) the density or accessibility of particular types of jobs (e.g. part-time jobs vs. full-time jobs). The most common use of these models is the...

Can publicly available, web-scraped data be used to identify promising business startups at an early stage? To answer this question, we use such textual and non-textual information about the names of Danish firms and their addresses as well as their business purpose statements (BPSs)...

This article introduces lassopack, a suite of programs for regularized regression in Stata. lassopack implements lasso, square-root lasso, elastic net, ridge regression, adaptive lasso and post-estimation OLS. The methods are suitable for the high-dimensional setting where the number of...

While there is evidence that return migration promotes entrepreneurship and self-employment of those who migrated, previous studies have not focused on whether migration provides the same benefits to individuals who did not migrate. Using a unique dataset that provides information on both...

This paper proposes a parametric approach to estimating a dynamic binary response panel data model that allows for endogenous contemporaneous regressors. Such a model is of particular value for settings in which one wants to estimate the effects of an endogenous treatment on a binary outcome. In...

Mundlak (1978) proposed the addition of time averages to the usual panel equation in order to remove the fixed effects bias. We extend this Mundlak equation further by replacing the time-varying explanatory variables by the corresponding deviations from the averages over time, while keeping the...

Probit and logit models typically require a normalization on the error variance for model identification. This paper shows that in the context of sample mean probability decompositions, error variance normalizations preclude estimation of the effects of group differences in the latent variable...

Union density in Germany has declined remarkably during the last two decades. We estimate socio-economic and workplace-related determinants of union membership in East and West Germany using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel by means of Chamberlain-Mundlack correlated random effects...

This paper presents a convenient shortcut method for implementing the Heckman estimator of the dynamic random effects probit model using standard software. It then compares the three estimators proposed by Heckman, Orme and Wooldridge based on three alternative approximations, first in an...