This paper considers a setting in which the acquisition of human capital entails a change of location in social space that causes individuals to revise their comparison groups. Skill levels are viewed as occupational groups, and moving up the skill ladder by acquiring additional human capital,...

We show that within a life-cycle skill accumulation model, IV identification of the return to schooling parameter is either achieved at any point in the life-cycle where the level of skills accumulated beyond school completion for compliers is exactly equal to the post-schooling skill level of...

We designed and fielded an experimental module in the American Life Panel (ALP) where we ask individuals to report the number of their purchases and the amount paid by debit cards, cash, credit cards, and personal checks. The design of the experiment features several stages of randomization....

In many countries the demand for health care services is of increasing importance. Especially in the industrialized world with a changing demographic structure social insurances and politics face real challenges. Reliable predictors of those demand functions will therefore become invaluable...

In many empirical problems, the evaluation of treatment effects is complicated by sample selection such that the outcome is only observed for a non-random subpopulation. In the absence of instruments and/or tight parametric assumptions, treatment effects are not point identified, but can be...

This paper proposes tests for instrument validity in sample selection models with non-randomly censored outcomes. Such models commonly invoke an exclusion restriction (i.e., the availability of an instrument affecting selection, but not the outcome) and additive separability of the errors in the...

The study of the innovative output of firms often relies on a count of patents filed at one single office of reference such as the European Patent Office (EPO). Yet, not all firms file their patents at the EPO, raising the specter of a selection bias. Using a novel dataset of the whole...