We measure the impact of individuals' looks on their life satisfaction or happiness. Using five data sets from the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and Germany, we construct beauty measures in different ways that allow putting a lower bound on the true effects of beauty on happiness. Personal beauty...

This dissertation consists of three essays in LaborEconomics. The first chapter estimates the costs for establishments of hires andseparations for a panel of German establishments. The panel records the start and thetermination of the employment of all employees in the surveyed establishments,...

In the first essay, we propose a nonparametric testing methodology for jump diffusion models of asset prices with stochastic volatility. We test various parametric specifications against a nonparametric alternative. The test statistic is constructed using the transition densities of the asset...

We offer evidence of gender selection within the United States. Analysis of comprehensive birth data shows unusually high boy-birth percentages after 1980 among later children (most notably third and fourth children) born to Chinese and Asian Indian mothers. Based upon linked data from...

This paper utilizes quantile-regression techniques in order to estimate the effects of demographics and maternal behavior during pregnancy at various quantiles of the birthweight distribution. Due to the high costs and long-term effects (both medical and economic) associated with low-birthweight...

Using a very large sample of matched author-referee pairs, we examine how the gender of referees and authors affects the former's recommendations. Relying on changing matches of authors and referees, we find no evidence of gender differences among referees in charitableness toward authors; nor...

This paper shows that the bootstrap does not consistently estimate the asymptotic distribution of the maximum score estimator. The theory developed also applies to other estimators within a cube-root convergence class. For some single-parameter estimators in this class, the results suggest a...