Using a structural dynamic programming model, we investigate the relative importance of family background variables and individual specific abilities in explaining cross-sectional differences in schooling attainments and wages. Each type of ability is the sum of one component correlated with...

Conventional urban economic analysis suggests that a local economy's size is closely related to a number of features, including levels of human capital and the availability of specialized inputs, which are likely to influence positively the rate at which it accumulates further economic activity....

This paper investigates the time series properties of partisanship for five political parties in Spain. It is found that pure fractional processes with a degree of integration, d, between 0.6 and 0.8 fit the time-series behaviour of aggregate opinion polls for mainstream parties quite well,...

Using data from both the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) and High School and Beyond (HSB), we investigate if public high schools differ in the “production” of earnings and if rates of return to future education vary with public high school attended. Given evidence of such...

Based on intergenerational data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, I provide estimates of income mobility across generations for men. Special attention is paid to issues of censoring caused by a son's unemployment. Employing non-parametric bounds estimates, I illustrate that previous...

A recent article (Collard et al., 2002) published in this journal presented a structural model of aggregate job flows. Unrestricted estimation of the model yields parameter estimates that would imply an unemployment rate of 99%. Instead of solving this problem by fixing one of the parameters, as...

In most democracies, at least two out of any three individuals vote for the same party in sequential elections. This paper presents a model in which vote-persistence is partly due to the dependence of the utility on the previous voting decision. This dependence is termed 'habit formation'. The...

This paper contributes in three dimensions to the literature on health care demand. First, it features the first application of a bivariate random effects estimator in a count data setting, to permit the efficient estimation of this type of model with panel data. Second, it provides an...