The recent literature on instrumental variables (IV) features models in which agents sort into treatment status on the basis of gains from treatment as well as on baselinepretreatment levels. Components of the gains known to the agents and acted on by them may not be known by the observing...

This paper develops a new method for estimating the demand function for gasoline and the deadweight loss due to an increase in the gasoline tax. The method is also applicable to other goods. The method uses shape restrictions derived from economic theory to improve the precision of a...

While the yield spread has long been recognized as a good predictor of recessions, it seems to have been largely overlooked by professional forecasters. We examine this puzzle, established by Rudebusch and Williams (2009), in a data-rich environment including not just the yield spread but many...

We analyze the influence of IMF and World Bank programs on political regime transitions. We develop an extended version of Acemoglu and Robinson's [American Economic Review 91, 2001] model of political transitions to show how the anticipation of new loans from in-ternational financial...

This paper examines the degree of persistence of youth unemployment (total, male and female) in twenty-four countries by using two alternative measures: the AR coefficient and the fractional differencing parameter, based on short- and long-memory processes respectively. The evidence suggests...

After describing qualitatively the increasingly flexible organization of work hours in Germany, I turn to the German Socio-Economic Panel to quantify practices and trends, and assess their effects on workers and employers. Measuring flexibility as the extent to which overtime is compensated with...

Studies on health effects of unemployment usually neglect spillover effects on spouses. This study specifically investigates the effect of an individual's unemployment on the mental health of their spouse. In order to allow for causal interpretation of the estimates, it focuses on an exogenous...

The paper provides new evidence on the outmigration of foreign-born immigrants. We make use of data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and employ penalised spline smoothing in the context of a Poisson-type Generalised Additive Mixed Model (GAMM), which enables us to incorporate bivariate...