The "joint costs" model states that the incentive to strike is inversely related to the total costs associated with workers' and firms' strike activities. Not only has this model been tested with mixed results, but also the joint costs model is problematic in explaining several stylized facts in...

Raising a new-born child involves not only financial resources, but also time investment from the parents. A time constraint can affect important decisions made by parents at the early stages of an infant's life. One form of investment that is particularly important is vaccinating an infant. We...

The Short-Time Compensation (STC) program enables US firms to reduce work hours via pro-rated Unemployment Insurance (UI) benefits, rather than relying on layoffs as a cost-cutting tool. Despite the program's potential to preclude skill loss and rehiring/ retraining costs, firms' participation...

This paper relaxes the assumption of homogeneous rates of return to schooling by employing nonparametric kernel regression. This approach allows us to examine the differences in rates of return to education both across and within groups. Similar to previous studies we find that on average blacks...

This paper proposes a new strategy to identify causal effects. Instead of finding a conventional instrumental variable correlated with the treatment but not with the confounding effects, we propose an approach which employs an instrument correlated with the confounders, but which itself is not...

This paper examines the long-term health impact of Agent Orange, a toxic military herbicide containing dioxin that was used extensively during the U.S.-Vietnam war in the 1960-70s. Using a nationally representative health survey and an instrumental variable approach that addresses the potential...

Some interventions or population attributes negate the effects of a treatment. This paper shows that incorporating these, what we call antidotal variables (AV), into a causal treatment effects analysis can with one cross-sectional regression identify the true causal effect, in addition to...

We assess whether the COVID-19 vaccine induces COVID-19 risky behavior (e.g., going to bars and restaurants) and thus reduces vaccine efficacy. A key empirical challenge is the endogeneity bias when comparing risk-taking by vaccination status since people choose whether to get vaccinated. To...

This paper shows how a shorter fecundity horizon for females (a biological constraint) leads to age and educational disparities between husbands and wives. Empirical support is based on data from a natural experiment commencing before and ending after China's 1980 one-child law. The results...

Data from the first two waves of the Fragile Family and Child Wellbeing study indicate that infants who look like their father at birth are healthier one year later. The reason is such father-child resemblance induces a father to spend more time engaged in positive parenting. An extra day (per...