Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of gravity variables and trade costs on China's export margins. Design/methodology/approach – Following the structural gravity model with firm heterogeneity, the paper measures the extensive margins and intensive margins of...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of internet usage on financial performance of small farm business households in the USA. In particular, the authors want to assess the impact of internet usage on small farm businesses, where the owner’s main occupation is farming....

This note provides a simple exposition of what IV can and cannot estimate in a model with binary treatment variable and heterogenous treatment effects. It shows how linear IV is essentially a misspecification of functional form and the reason why linear IV estimates will generally depend on the...

Summary Empirical work on the wage impact of training has noted that unobserved heterogeneity of training participants should play a role. The expected return to training, which partly depends on unobservable characteristics, is likely to be a crucial criterion in the decision to take part in...

Abstract The E-value is defined as the minimum strength of association on the risk ratio scale that an unmeasured confounder would have to have with both the exposure and the outcome, conditional on the measured covariates, to explain away the observed exposure-outcome association. We have...

Abstract This paper studies the connections among the asymmetric Laplace probability density (ALPD), maximum likelihood, maximum entropy and quantile regression. We show that the maximum likelihood problem is equivalent to the solution of a maximum entropy problem where we impose moment...

Abstract We interpret an ecological inference model as a treatment effects model in which the outcomes of interest and the conditional covariates come from separate datasets. In this setting, the counterfactual distributions and policy parameters of interest are only partially identified under a...

Many more impact evaluations could be done, and at lower unit cost, if evaluators could avoid the need for baseline data using objective socio-economic surveys and rely instead on retrospective subjective questions on how outcomes have changed, asked post-intervention. But would the results be...

Can project evaluation methods be used to evaluate programs: complex interventions involving multiple activities? A program evaluation cannot be based simply on separate evaluations of its components if interactions between the activities are important. In this paper a measure is proposed, the...

There are a number of international conventions and national legislations in response to child labor. However, children are being vulnerable to different work related risks. The risks and impacts of child labor can be determined by the age of child, the type and hours of work performed and the...