Childcare arrangements are key in women's ability to juggle motherhood and working outside the home. As such, the study of the access to childcare and its use is of great policy relevance. We focus on a particular kind of informal childcare, the one provided by grandparents. Empirically,...

We find evidence that workforce educational diversity promotes entrepreneurial behavior of employees as well as the formation of new firms, whereas diversity in demographics hinders transitions to selfemployment. Ethnic diversity favors entrepreneurship in financial and business services.

The interpretation of instrumental variables (IV) estimates as local average treatment effects (LATE) of instrument-induced shifts in treatment raises concerns about their external validity and policy relevance. We examine how to move beyond LATE in situations where the instrument is discrete,...

In an increasing number of empirical studies, the dimensionality measured e.g. as the size of the parameter space of interest, can be very large. Two instances of large dimensional models are the linear regression with a large number of covariates and the estimation of a regression function with...

One of the most important structural relationships for policy makers is the Phillips curve; thus, this topic is the focus of ongoing theoretical and empirical research. We estimate the degree of information stickiness implied by the sticky information Phillips curve proposed by Mankiw and Reis...

How does measured performance at university affect labor market outcomes? We show that degree class - a coarse measure of student performance used in the UK - causally affects graduates' industry and hence expected wages. To control for unobserved ability, we employ a regression discontinuity...

This volume was prepared by Rahel Aichele while she was working at the ifo Institute. It was completed in December 2012 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich. It includes five self-contained chapters. The chapters investigate how, in a...

We derive mean-unbiased estimators for the structural parameter in instrumental variables models where the sign of one or more first stage coefficients is known. In the case with a single instrument, the unbiased estimator is unique. For cases with multiple instruments we propose a class of...

Predictive return regressions with persistent regressors are typically plagued by (asymptotically) biased/inconsistent estimates of the slope, non-standard or potentially even spurious statistical inference, and regression unbalancedness. We alleviate the problem of unbalancedness in the...

This paper contributes to the research on interdependencies in spousal labor supply by analyzing labor supply response of married women to their husbands' job losses ("added worker effect"). It empirically tests the hypothesis of added worker effect relying on a case study on Turkey during the...