In developing economies the purchase of a new machine by the firm can be a way of introducing a new product or processes. Under such considerations, this paper searches to measure the assumption of innovation via machine embodied technology, by verifying its impacts over the firm's productivity....

A simple shrinkage method is proposed to improve the performance of weighting estimators of the average treatment effect. As the weights in these estimators can become arbitrarily large for the propensity scores close to the boundaries, three different variants of a shrinkage method for the...

This paper analyzes estimators based on the instrumental variable quantile regression (IVQR) model (Chernozhukov and Hansen, 2004, 2005, 2006) under the local quantile treatment effects (LQTE) framework (Abadie et al., 2002). I show that the quantile treatment effect (QTE) estimators in the IVQR...

A comparison of hazard rates of duration outcomes before and after policy changes is hampered by non-identification if there is unobserved heteogeneity in the effects and no model structure is imposed. We develop a discontinuity approach that overcomes this by exploiting variation in the moment...

Empirical results show that unemployment benefits (UB) recipients significantly change to worse job conditions with respect to wages and firm size, but change to better job conditions with respect to occupation, position, industry, and residence. While the effects for occupation are not...

This paper investigates the effects of land titling on labor supply for households heads. The effect of legal ownership security on the adult labor supply is identified by comparing the impact of being part of, or excluded from, a land title program in a unique public intervention in two...

Instrumental variables (IVs) are commonly used to estimate the effects of some treatments. A valid IV should be as good as randomly assigned, it should not have a direct effect on the outcome, and it should not induce any unit to forgo treatment. This last condition, the so-called monotonicity...

Causal effects of a policy change on the hazard rates of a duration outcome variable are not identified from a comparison of spells before and after the policy change when there is unobserved heterogeneity in the effects and no model structure is imposed. We develop a discontinuity approach that...

The purpose of this study is to identify a person's likelihood of emigrating to another country and to identify a household's likelihood of receiving remittances. We also compute average treatment effects as well as the marginal impact of receiving remittances on household welfare, across...