This paper investigates a unique feature of the English educational system to estimate the causal effect of compulsory schooling on labour market outcomes. We examine school leaving rules that allow for discrete variation in exit dates by date of birth within school cohorts. This natural...

We consider cross-sectional data that exhibit no spatial correla- tion, but are feared to be spatially dependent. We demonstrate that a spatial version of the stochastic volatility model of nancial econometrics, entailing a form of spatial autoregression, can explain such behaviour. The...

We utilize the Becker-DeGroot-Marschak (1964) mechanism to estimate the willingness to pay for clean drinking water technology in northern Ghana. The BDM mechanism has attractive properties for empirical research, allowing us to directly estimate demand, compute heterogeneous treatment effects,...

The Story of the Hats is a puzzle in social epistemology. It describes a situation in which a group of rational agents with common priors and common goals seems vulnerable to a Dutch book if they are exposed to different information and make decisions independently. Situations in which this...

Using data from the British Household Panel Survey, we illustrate how longitudinal repeated measures of binary outcomes are analysed using population average and subject specific logistic regression models. We show how the autocorrelation found in longitudinal data is accounted for by both...

This paper provides a survey of results on the quantiles of a Brownian motion with drift as well as a general Lévy process. The motivation is to calculate the price of related financial options. At the end of the paper some new results on variability orderings between various quantities...

We estimate the impact of compulsory schooling on earnings using changes in compulsory schooling laws in West Germany after World War II. Most estimates in the literature indicate returns in the range of 10% to 15%. While our research design is very similar to studies for various other...

We propose two new types of nonparametric tests for investigating multivariate regression functions. The tests are based on cumulative sums coupled with either minimum volume sets or inverse regression ideas; involving no multivariate nonparametric regression estimation. The methods proposed...

We propose a parametric wavelet thresholding procedure for estimation in the ‘function plus independent, identically distributed Gaussian noise’ model. To reflect the decreasing sparsity of wavelet coefficients from finer to coarser scales, our thresholds also decrease. They retain the...

Over the past five years numerous cross-national statistical studies have been conducted on the causes of civil war. The most influential studies have been those by Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler.Their work has been widely cited in international reports on security and stability. This paper...