This paper investigates the extent to which test performance is affected by shocks to non-cognitive skills. 440 students took a low stakes mathematics test. About half of them were exposed to positive affirmation while being given test instructions, whereas the other half served as controls. The...

This paper provides new insight into the firm-level employment impacts of trade cost changes at the industry level in the Austrian services sector. We apply a two-part model of firm survival (exit) and firm growth. Separate regressions for firm entry rates at the industry-region level complete...

This paper is concerned with tests of restrictions on the sample path of conditional quantile processes. These tests are tantamount to assessments of lack of fit for models of conditional quantile functions or more generally as tests of how certain covariates affect the distribution of an...

This paper develops a likelihood-based methodology to estimate loss distributions and compute Capital at Risk in risk management applications. In particular, we deal with the problem of estimating severity distributions with censored and truncated operational losses, for which numerical...

This study examines the performance of acquisitions in the Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) industry around the acquisition announcement and in the long-run. The results suggest that the acquiring REITs experience statistically significant negative abnormal returns while the target REITs earn...

Propensity score matching estimators have two advantages. One is that they overcome the curse of dimensionality of covariate matching, and the other is that they are nonparametric. However, the propensity score is usually unknown and needs to be estimated. If we estimate it nonparametrically, we...

This study analyzes poverty dynamics in Nicaragua between 1998 and 2001. It goes further, in simulating an iron supplement program to test if reduction in poverty, vulnerability and undernourishment is significant. The findings support the argument that targeted food policies to remove chronic...

Currently there is little practical advice on which treatment effect estimator to use when trying to adjust for observable differences. A recent suggestion is to compare the performance of estimators in simulations that somehow mimic the empirical context. Two ways to run such 'empirical Monte...

Context effects, where a characteristic of an upper-level unit or cluster (e.g., a country) affects outcomes and relationships at a lower level (e.g., that of the individual), are a primary object of sociological inquiry. In recent years, sociologists have increasingly analyzed such effects...

We propose a test for the key identification and estimation conditions in Regression Discontinuity (RD) designs. We characterize the set of sharp testable implications of the RD assumptions, for which the proposed test is uniformly valid under a class of distributions, is consistent against all...