In this paper we perform inference on the effect of a treatment on survival times in studies where the treatment assignment is not randomized and the assignment time is not known in advance. Two such studies are discussed: a heart transplant program and a study of Swedish unemployed eligible for...

In communities highly dependent on rainfed agriculture for their livelihoods, the common occurrence of climatic shocks can lower the marginal cost of a child and raise fertility. We test this hypothesis using longitudinal data from Madagascar. Exploiting exogenous within-district year-to-year...

In the current paper, the finite-sample stability of various implementations of the KPSS test is studied. The implementations considered differ in how the so-called long-run variance is estimated under the null hypothesis. More specifically, the effects that the choice of kernel, the value of...

The Regression Kink (RK) design is an increasingly popular empirical method, with more than 20 studies circulated using RK in the last 5 years since the initial circulation of Card, Lee, Pei and Weber (2012). We document empirically that these estimates, which typically use local linear...

Identification in most sample selection models depends on the independence of the regressors and the error terms conditional on the selection probability. All quantile and mean functions are parallel in these models; this implies that quantile estimators cannot reveal any - per assumption...

The estimation problem in this paper is motivated by maximum score estimation of preference parameters in the binary choice model under uncertainty in which the decision rule is affected by conditional expectations. The preference parameters are estimated in two stages: we estimate conditional...

Market risk management is one of the key factors to success in managing financial institutions. Underestimated risk can have desastrous consequences for individual companies and even whole economies, not least as could be seen during the recent crises. Overestimated risk, on the other side, may...

The generalized method of moments estimator may be substantially biased in finite samples, especially so when there are large numbers of unconditional moment conditions. This paper develops a class of first order equivalent semi-parametric efficient estimators and tests for conditional moment...

The principal purpose of this paper is to adapt to the conditional moment context the GEL unconditional moment methods described in Smith(1997, 2001) and Newey and Smith(2004). In particular we develop GEL estimators which achieve the semiparametric efficiency lower bound. The requisite GEL...

We develop a practical and novel method for inference on intersection bounds, namely bounds defined by either the infimum or supremum of a parametric or nonparametric function, or equivalently, the value of a linear programming problem with a potentially infinite constraint set. We show that...