This paper addresses the problem of point identification in the presence of measurement error in discrete variables; in particular, it considers the case of having two “noisy†indicators of the same latent variable and without any prior information about the true value of the variable...

Research has shown that birth weight has a lasting impact on adult outcomes such as education and earnings. This paper examines the role of nutritional intake in utero on academic achievement in childhood, which may provide a link between birth weight and adult outcomes, and further investigates...

This paper identifies and estimates the impact of early retirement on the probability to die within five years,using administrative micro panel data covering the entire population of the Netherlands. Among the older workers we focus on, a group of civil servants became eligible for retirement...

The literature on skill formation and human capital development clearly demonstrates that early investment in children is an equitable and efficient policy with large returns in adulthood. Yet little is known about the mechanisms involved in producing these long-term effects. This paper presents...

This paper studies a class of optimal stopping problems that has become popular in the area of investment under uncertainty (``real options''). Necessary conditions for solutions to these problems are that the solution dominates the payoff function and is superharmonic. Neither property is...

To combat growing levels of obesity, health related taxes have been suggested with taxes on foods high in fat or sugar. Such taxes have been criticised on the basis of their regressivity and potentially adverse impact upon poverty. This paper analyses the effect of such taxes on a range of...

Members of the National Child Development Study (NCDS) cohort attended very different types of secondary school, as their schooling lay within the transition period of the comprehensive education reform in England and Wales. This provides a natural setting to explore the impact of educational...

When event data are retrospectively reported, more temporally distal events tend to get “heaped” on even multiples of reporting units. Heaping may introduce a type of attenuation bias because it causes researchers to mismatch time-varying right-hand side variables. We develop a model-based...

Controversy exists over whether health insurance reduces the individual incentives to invest in prevention activities; there is no consensus on the existence of ex ante moral hazard (EAMH). Past evidence shows that insurance seems to reduce investment in secondary prevention (e.g. check-ups),...

In April 2006, the state of Massachusetts passed legislation aimed at achieving near universal health insurance coverage. A key provision of this legislation, and of the national legislation passed in March 2010, is an individual mandate to obtain health insurance. In this paper, we use hospital...