Using the Benchmark and Annual Surveys of U.S. Direct Investment Abroad collected by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the authors examine the operations of U.S. multinational corporations (MNCs) in seven manufacturing industries and twenty-two countries over the years 1982-91. They analyze how...

Learning models extend the traditional discrete choice framework by postulating that consumers have incomplete information about product attributes, and that they learn about these attributes over time. In this survey we describe the literature on learning models that has developed over the past...

To measure the extent of incomplete information about brand qualities faced by consumers, recent research in marketing and economics has extended traditional static choice models to explicitly allow for consumer learning. These models tend to be complicated and make stringent assumptions such as...

2SLS has poor properties if instruments are exogenous but weak. But how strong must instruments be for 2SLS estimates and test statistics to exhibit acceptable properties? A common standard is a first-stage F ≥ 10. This is adequate to ensure two- tailed t-tests have small size distortions. But...

There is a long standing controversy over the magnitude of the Frisch labor supply elasticity. Macro economists using DSGE models often calibrate it to be large, while many micro data studies find it is small. Several papers attempt to reconcile the micro and macro results. We o ff er a new...

We provide a simple survey of the literature on weak instruments, aimed at giving practical advice to applied researchers. It is well-known that 2SLS has poor properties if instruments are exogenous but “weak.” We clarify these properties, explain weak instrument tests, and examine how...

This paper develops a new simulation estimation algorithm that is particularly useful for estimating dynamic panel data models with unobserved endogenous state variables. The new approach can deal with the commonly encountered and widely discussed ``initial conditions problem,'' as well as the...

Over the past decade, a substantial literature on the estimation of discrete choice dynamic programming (DC-DP) models of behavior has developed. However, this literature now faces major computational barriers. Specifically, in order to solve the dynamic programming (DP) problems that generate...

Two key issues in the literature on female labor supply are: (1) if persistence in employment status is due to unobserved heterogeneity or state dependence, and (2) if fertility is exogenous to labor supply. Until recently, the consensus was that unobserved heterogeneity is very important, and...

This paper uses micro panel data to examine differences in the cyclical variability of employment, hours, and real wages for skilled and unskilled workers. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we find that, at the aggregate level, skilled and unskilled workers are subject to essentially the same...