This paper revisits the widely known and used concept of soft budget constraints in party-states introduced by Kornai (1980), from the point of view of a comparative analytical model (Csanádi, 2003). It embeds budget constraints in the structure of power relations described by the model as the...

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

We apply a recently proposed method to disentangle unobserved heterogeneity from risk in returns to education. We replicate the original study on US men and extend to US women, UK men and German men. Most original results are not robust. A college education cannot universally be considered an...