This chapter provides background for understanding and applying special regressor methods. This chapter is intended for inclusion in the "Handbook of Applied Nonparametric and Semiparametric Econometrics and Statistics," Co-edited by Aman Ullah, Jeffrey Racine, and Liangjun Su, to be published...

How do abortion costs affect non-marital childbearing? While greater access to abortion has the first-order effect of reducing childbearing among pregnant women, it could nonetheless lead to unintended consequences via effects on marriage market norms. Single motherhood could rise if lower-cost...

This paper asks the question, "How should the level of mass transit service be adjusted when road pricing is introduced for a substitute auto mode?" The reference point for the introduction of road pricing is second-best optimization in transit. Because this involves below- marginal-cost pricing...

This paper uses a New Keynesian model with banks and deposits, calibrated to match the US economy, to study the macroeconomic effects of policies that pay interest on reserves. While their effects on output and inflation are small, these policies require important adjustments in the way that the...

Why do some men father children outside of marriage but not provide support? Why are some single women willing to have children outside of marriage when they receive little or no support from unmarried fathers? Why is this behavior especially common among blacks? To shed light on these...

Experimental evidence suggests that individuals who face an asymmetric distribution over the likelihood of a specific event might actually prefer not to know the exact value of this probability. We address these findings by studying a decision maker who has recursive, non-expected utility...

This paper formulates and estimates a dynamic discrete choice model of elder parent care and work to analyze how caregiving affects a woman’s current and future labor force participation and wages. Intertemporal tradeoffs, such as decreased future earning capacity due to a current reduction in...

This paper examines the changing distribution of where women and girls live in India at the smallest scale possible: India's nearly 600,000 villages. The village level variation in the proportion female is far larger than the variation across districts. Decomposing the variance, I show that...

Since Becker (1971), a common argument against asymmetric norms that promote minority rights over those of the majority is that such policies reduce total welfare. While this may be the case, we show that there are simple environments where aggregate sum of individual utilities is actually...

We characterize efficient allocations and cyclical fluctuations in a labor selection model. Potential new hires are heterogenous in the cross-section in their degree of training costs. In a calibrated version of the model that identifies costly selection with micro-level data on training costs,...