We analyze the extent to which three important factors can explain the high costs of health care in the US relative to the UK: (i) the high cost of medical education, (ii) high risks/costs associated with malpractice litigation, and (iii) excessive diagnostic testing arising from the practice of...

There is a long standing controversy over the magnitude of the Frisch labor supply elasticity. Macro economists using DSGE models often calibrate it to be large, while many micro data studies find it is small. Several papers attempt to reconcile the micro and macro results. We o ff er a new...

We provide a simple survey of the literature on weak instruments, aimed at giving practical advice to applied researchers. It is well-known that 2SLS has poor properties if instruments are exogenous but “weak.” We clarify these properties, explain weak instrument tests, and examine how...

2SLS has poor properties if instruments are exogenous but weak. But how strong must instruments be for 2SLS estimates and test statistics to exhibit acceptable properties? A common standard is a first-stage F ≥ 10. This is adequate to ensure two- tailed t-tests have small size distortions. But...

We study the impact of child work on cognitive development in four Low- and Middle-Income Countries. We advance the literature by using cognitive test scores collected regardless of school attendance. We also address a key gap in the literature by controlling for children’s complete time...

Predicting the impact of climate change on crop yield is difficult, in part because the production function mapping weather to yield is high dimensional and nonlinear. We compare three approaches to predicting yields: (i) deep neural networks (DNNs), (ii) traditional panel-data models, and (iii)...