We document increased old-age mortality rates among Swedish twin mothers compared to non-twin mothers. Results are based on administrative data on mortality for the years 1990 to 2010. We argue that twins are an unplanned shock to fertility in the cohorts of older women considered. Deaths due to...

Recent research in contract theory on the effects of behavioral biases implicitly assumes that they are stable, in the sense of not being affected by the contracts themselves. In this paper, we provide evidence that this is not necessarily the case. We show that in an insurance context, being...

Recent research in contract theory on the effects of behavioral biases implicitly assumes that they are stable, in the sense of not being affected by the contracts themselves. In this paper, we provide evidence that this is not necessarily the case. We show that in an insurance context, being...

Forcing a left-handed child to use the right hand for writing was long common practice in the Western world. Although it is rare now in these societies, it is still highly prevalent in developing countries and across various cultures. Forced right-hand writing is a rare early childhood...

Theoretical considerations suggest that nonlinear health care price schedules have heterogeneous effects on health care demand. In this paper, we develop and apply a finite mixture bivariate probit model to analyze whether there are heterogeneous reactions to the introduction of a nonlinear...

The German health care reform of 2004 imposes a charge of 10 Euro for the first visit to a doctor in each quarter of the year. Exploiting random variation in the interview day of the German Socio-Economic Panel, this study finds a substantial effect of the new fee on the probability of visiting...

This paper demonstrates that popular linear fixed-effects panel-data estimators are biased and inconsistent when applied in a discrete-time hazard setting - that is, one in which the outcome variable is a binary dummy indicating an absorbing state, even if the data-generating process is fully...

The German health care reform of 2004 imposes a charge of 10 Euro for the first visit to a doctor in each quarter of the year. At first glance, there is no inhibiting effect of this fee on utilization in the German Socio-Economic Panel. However, this study reveals that the true effect is...

We investigate the behaviour of the Lasso for selecting invalid instruments in linear instrumental variables models for estimating causal effects of exposures on outcomes, as proposed recently by Kang, Zhang, Cai and Small (2016, Journal of the American Statistical Association). Invalid...

Heterogeneous effects are prevalent in many economic settings. As the functional form between outcomes and regressors is generally unknown a priori, a semiparametric negative binomial count data model is proposed which is based on the local likelihood approach and generalized product kernels....