Drawing on principal-agent perspectives on corporate governance, this paper examines whether employees' hourly pay is linked to ownership dispersion. Using linked workplace-worker data from the British Workplace Employment Relations Survey (WERS) 2011, we find average hourly pay is higher in...

This paper empirically examines firm owners' gender difference in labor demand. We estimate the average treatment effect (ATE) of female ownership on employment of the firm using the 2007 Survey of Business Owners (SBO) Public Use Micro Sample (PUMS), provided by the U.S. Census Bureau. Because...

Reliable measures of obesity are essential in order to develop effective policies to tackle the costs of obesity. In this paper we examine what, if anything, we can learn about obesity rates using self-reported BMI once we allow for possible measurement error. We combine self-reported data on...

Journals favor rejection of the null hypothesis. This selection upon tests may distort the behavior of researchers. Using 50,000 tests published between 2005 and 2011 in the AER, JPE, and QJE, we identify a residual in the distribution of tests that cannot be explained by selection. The...

It has become orthodox in economics research to interpret the association between hourly earnings and working hours as the expression of the preferences of workers. This convention originated in H. Gregg Lewis' explanation for the decline in hours of work since the nineteenth century. His...

This paper is motivated by our attempt to answer an empirical question: how is private health insurance take-up in Australia affected by the income threshold at which the Medicare Levy Surcharge (MLS) kicks in? We propose a new difference de-convolution kernel estimator for the location and size...

We derive nonparametric sharp bounds on average treatment effects with an instrumental variable (IV) and use them to evaluate the effectiveness of the Job Corps (JC) training program for disadvantaged youth. We concentrate on the population average treatment effect (ATE) and the average...

This paper examines the economic consequences of terror attacks and the channels through which terrorism affects local economies. I rely on an exhaustive list of terror attacks over the period 1970-2013 in the U.S. and exploit the inherent randomness in the success or failure of terror attacks...

Korean government has invested significant amount of resources through credit guarantee funds to promote SMEs survival, performance and R&D investment. This study attempts to identify determinants of provision of credit guarantees and estimate their effects on firms R&D expenditures. The...

A growing literature on inference in difference-in-differences (DiD) designs with grouped errors has been pessimistic about obtaining hypothesis tests of the correct size, particularly with few groups. We provide Monte Carlo evidence for three points: (i) it is possible to obtain tests of the...