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...

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...

International trade is a major channel for technology diffusion. However regressing trade in R&D intensive goods to evaluate the effect of technology imports on productivity in a cross section of countries may be misleading because of simultaneity bias. I identify the effect of technology trade...

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 has...

This paper exploits an unusual policy reform that had the effect of reducing the direct cost of schooling in Ireland in the late 1960’s. This gave rise to an increased level of schooling but with effects that vary substantially across family background. This interaction of educational reform...

This paper conducts a general analysis of the conditions under which consistent estimation can be achieved in instrumental variables regression when the available instruments are weak in the local-to-zero sense. More precisely, the approach adopted in this paper combines key features of the...

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...

We develop results for the use of LASSO and Post-LASSO methods to form first-stage predictions and estimate optimal instruments in linear instrumental variables (IV) models with many instruments, p, that apply even when p is much larger than the sample size, n. We rigorously develop asymptotic...

We study identification and estimation in a binary response model with random coefficients B allowed to be correlated with regressors X. Our objective is to identify the mean of the distribution of B and estimate a trimmed mean of this distribution. Like Imbens and Newey (2009), we use...