In 1981, Chile introduced nationwide school choice by providing vouchers to any student wishing to attend a “voucher school”. We use a binary instrument based on the reform and unique information on individual cognitive skills to examine the importance of cognitive skills on labor market...

It has been known since Phillips and Hansen (1990) that cointegrated systems can be consistently estimated using stochastic trend instruments that are independent of the system variables. A similar phenomenon occurs with deterministically trending instruments. The present work shows that such...

This paper develops shrinkage methods for addressing the “many instruments” problem in the context of instrumental variable estimation. It has been observed that instrumental variable estimators may behave poorly if the number of instruments is large. This problem can be addressed by...

This paper uses a Finnish policy intervention to study tax competition among local governments. Changes in the statutory lower limits to the property tax rates are used as a source of exogenous variation to estimate the responses of municipalities to tax rates in their neighboring...

Who really wins from foreign direct investment (FDI) and by how much? Should winners care about corruption? Building on evidence of heterogeneity in the FDI-growth relationship, we propose a semiparametric model that allows corruption to influence the relationship between the conditioning...

What shapes the size of a personal network of family and friends? We concentrates here on the effect of retirement from the work force. Retirement provides time to develop personal relationships; but it deprives from a potential supply of colleague friends. We draw evidence from a new question...

Being retired goes with more frequent participation in some social activities such as volunteering or going to a club. It also goes with an increase in the intensity of participation. To conclude about a causal effect of retirement we use the longitudinal SHARE data and an IV strategy. Indeed we...

This paper studies robustness of bootstrap inference methods for instrumental variable (IV)regression models. We consider test statistics for parameter hypotheses based on the IV estimatorand generalized method of trimmed moments (GMTM) estimator introduced by Cížek (2008, 2009),and compare...

A new way of constructing efficient semiparametric instrumental variable estimators is proposed. The method involves the combination of a large number of possibly inefficient estimators rather than combining the instruments into an optimal instrument function. The consistency and asymptotic...

An inflow of immigrants into a region affects house prices in three ways. In the short run, housing demand increases due to the increase in foreign-born population. In the long run, immigrants affect native location decisions and housing supply conditions. Previous research on the effect of...