During the last decade several empirical studies have stressed the importance of norms and social interactions for explaining sickness-absence behavior. In this context, public discussions about the intentions of the insurance, and of the rights and duties of the receivers, may be important for...

This article aims to answer to what extent fertility has a causal effect on households’ economic wellbeing—an issue that has received considerable interest in development studies and policy analysis. However, only recently has this literature begun to give importance to adequate modelling...

The paper examines the behavior of a generalized version of the nonlinear IV unit root test proposed by Chang (<CitationRef CitationID="CR6">2002</CitationRef>) when the series’ errors exhibit nonstationary volatility. The leading case of such nonstationary volatility concerns structural breaks in the error variance. We show that the...</citationref>

This paper sets out to explore the causality links between financial markets and foreign direct investment (FDI) in Africa. We use proxies for the banking sector and stock market to capture financial market development. We run separate estimations for the banking and stock market samples....

It is a major achievement of the econometric treatment effect literature to clarify under which conditions causal effects are non-parametrically identified. The first part of this chapter focuses on the static treatment model. In this part, I show how panel data can be used to improve the...

This paper shows how a weighted average of a forward and reverse Jackknife IV estimator (JIVE) yields estimators that are robust against heteroscedasticity and many instruments. These estimators, called HFUL (Heteroscedasticity robust Fuller) and HLIM (Heteroskedasticity robust limited...

In a recent paper, Hausman et al. (2012) propose a new estimator, HFUL (Heteroscedasticity robust Fuller), for the linear model with endogeneity. This estimator is consistent and asymptotically normally distributed in the many instruments and many weak instruments asymptotics. Moreover, this...

The aim of this paper is to investigate the effect of Employment Protection Legislation (EPL) on fertility decisions of Italian working women using administrative data. We exploit a reform that introduced in 1990 costs for dismissals unmotivated by a ‘fair cause’ or ‘justified motive’ in...

This paper estimates the marginal effect of class size on educational attainment of high school students. We control for the potential endogeneity of class size in two ways using a conventional instrumental variable approach, based on changes in cohort size, and an alternative method where...

We evaluate the effectiveness of small high school reform in the country’s largest school district, New York City. Using a rich administrative dataset for multiple cohorts of students and distance between student residence and school to instrument for endogenous school selection, we find...