Rain affects electoral turnout both through a direct effect on the cost of voting and by changing the opportunity cost. In a panel of Norwegian municipalities I find that rain on Election Day increases turnout. As turnout affects electoral outcomes, rain provides an exogeneous source of...

In the large empirical literature that investigates the causal effects of education on outcomes such as health, wages and crime, it is customary to measure education with years of schooling, and to identify these effects using the exogenous variation provided by school reforms increasing...

The ability to allow for flexible forms of unobserved heterogeneity is an essential ingredient in modern microeconometrics. In this paper we extend the application of instrumental variable (IV) models to a wide class of problems in which multiple values of unobservable variables can be...

I review recent work in the statistics literature on instrumental variables methods from an econometrics perspective. I discuss some of the older, economic, applications including supply and demand models and relate them to the recent applications in settings of randomized experiments with...

In this paper, we investigate what can be learned about average counterfactual outcomes when it is assumed that treatment response functions are smooth. The smoothness conditions in this paper amount to assuming that the differences in average counterfactual outcomes are bounded under different...

We analyze the impact of the quality of candidates running for a mayor position on turnout using a large data set on Italian municipal elections held from 1993 to 2011. We firstly estimate a municipal fixed effects model and show that an increase in the average quality of candidates competing at...