In this paper, we study the effect of interview modes on estimates of economic inequality which are based on survey data. We exploit quasi-experimental variation in interview modes in the Austrian EU-SILC panel, where between 2007 and 2008 the interview mode was switched from personal interviews...

Many methodological debates in microeconometrics are driven by the tension between ``what we can get'' (identification) and ``what we want'' (parameters of interest). This paper proposes to consider models of policy choice which allow for a joint formal discussion of both issues. We consider a...

This paper proposes an estimator and develops an inference procedure for the number of roots of functions which are nonparametrically identified by conditional moment restrictions. It is shown that a smoothed plug-in estimator of the number of roots is super-consistent under i.i.d. asymptotics,...

We provide a condition which is both necessary and sufficient for uniform validity of asymptotic approximations using the delta-method, that is for uniform negligibility of the remainder of such approximations. This condition is easily verified and permits to identify settings and parameter...

This paper discusses identification in continuous triangular systems without restrictions on heterogeneity or functional form. In particular, we do not assume separability of structural functions, restrictions on the dimensionality of unobservables, or monotonicity in unobservables. We do...

Changes in family structures, such as the composition of households with respect to size, age and gender, can have an impact on poverty rates and the income distribution more generally. We analyze the impact of changing family structures on the income distribution among adult Costa Rican women...

In this paper, a general framework is proposed for the use of (quasi-) experimental data when choosing policies such as tax rates or the level of inputs in a production process. The data are used to update expectations about social welfare as a function of policy, and the policy is chosen to...

Most policy changes generate winners and losers. Political economy and optimal policy suggest questions such as: Who wins, who loses? How much? Given a choice of welfare weights, what is the impact of the policy change on social welfare? This paper proposes a framework to empirically answer such...