Federal and state laws passed in the late 1990 increased considerably postpartum stays for newborns. Using all births in California over the 1995-2001 period, 2SLS estimates suggest that for the average newborn impacted by the law, increased treatment intensity had modest and statistically...

Under the assumption of no unmeasured confounders, a large literature exists on methods that can be used to estimating average treatment effects (ATE) from observational data and that spans regression models, propensity score adjustments using stratification, weighting or regression and even the...

This paper addresses estimation of an outcome characterized by mass at zero, significant skewness, and heteroscedasticity. Unlike other approaches suggested recently that require retransformations or arbitrary assumptions about error distributions, our estimation strategy uses sequences of...

Health expenditure data almost always include extreme values. Such heavy tails can be a threat to the commonly adopted least squares methods. To accommodate extreme values, we propose the use of an estimation method that recovers the often ignored right tail of health expenditure distributions....

Linear regressions with period and group fixed effects are widely used to estimate policies' effects: 26 of the 100 most cited papers published by the American Economic Review from 2015 to 2019 estimate such regressions. It has recently been show that those regressions may produce misleading...

Volatility tests are an alternative to regression tests for evaluating the joint null hypothesis of market efficiency and risk neutrality. Acomparison of the power of the two kinds of tests depends on what the alternative hypothesis is taken to be. By considering tests based on conditional...

In this paper we use an instrumental variable estimator to exploit sources of independent variation, which allows unbiased estimation of the tax-price elasticity under more general conditions. The estimator is applied to the demand for charitable giving. A charitable giving equation is an...

This paper attempts to provide the user of linear multiple regression with a battery of diagnostic tools to determine which, if any, data points have high leverage or influence on the estimation process and how these possibly discrepant data points differ from the patterns set by the majority of...