The effects of voluntary work on earnings have recently been studied for some developed countries such as Canada, France and Austria. This paper extends this line of research to Italy, using data from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) dataset. A double...

Instrumental Variables (IV) methods identify internally valid causal effects for individuals whose treatment status is manipulable by the instrument at hand. Inference for other populations inevitably requires some sort of homogeneity assumption. I develop a simple theoretical framework that...

This paper analyzes conditions under which various k-class estimators are asymptotically normal in a simultaneous equations framework with many weak instruments. In particular, our paper extends the many instruments asymptotic normality results obtained by Morimune (1983), Bekker (1994), Angrist...

This paper proposes shrinkage methods in instrumental variable estimations to solve the ``many instruments'' problem. Even though using a large number of instruments reduces the asymptotic variances of the estimators, it has been observed both in theoretical works and in practice that in finite...

An emerging literature on the geography of bohemians argues that a region’s lifestyle and cultural amenities explain, at least partly, the unequal distribution of highly qualified people across space, which in turn, explains geographic disparities in economic growth. However, to date, there...

This paper compares the economic questions addressed by instrumental variables estimators with those addressed by structural approaches. We discuss Marschak's Maxim: estimators should be selected on the basis of their ability to answer well-posed economic problems with minimal assumptions. A key...

This paper analyzes the conditions under which consistent estimation can be achieved in instrumental Variables (IV) regression when the available instruments are weak, in the local-to-zero sense of Staiger and Stock (1997) and using the many-instrument framework of Morimune (1983) and Bekker...

Using a rich Italian cross-sectional data set, we estimate the effect of a neighborhood quality index based on pollution, crime, and noise on self-assessed health, presence of chronic conditions and limitations in daily activities. We address the self-selection of the residents in their...

The validity of existing empirical tests of the Pollution Haven Hypothesis (PHH) is constantly under scrutiny due to two shortcomings. First, the issues of unobserved heterogeneity and measurement error in environmental regulation are typically ignored due to the lack of a credible, traditional...

This paper gives a test of overidentifying restrictions that is robust to many instruments and heteroskedasticity. It is based on a jackknife version of the Sargan test statistic, having a numerator that is the objective function minimized by the JIVE2 estimator of Angrist, Imbens, and Krueger...