In this paper we study the impact of air pollution on hospital admissions for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease for 103 Italian provinces, over the period from 2004 to 2009. We use information on annual mean concentrations of carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, particulate matter, and ozone...

What shapes the size of a personal network of family and friends? We concentrates here on the effect of retirement from the work force. Retirement provides time to develop personal relationships; but it deprives from a potential supply of colleague friends. We draw evidence from a new question...

Being retired goes with more frequent participation in some social activities such as volunteering or going to a club. It also goes with an increase in the intensity of participation. To conclude about a causal effect of retirement we use the longitudinal SHARE data and an IV strategy. Indeed we...

In economic sense, some events may be subject to spill-over from economy-wide or world-wide shocks. For instance a country’s fiscal policy, such as government spending, taxation, and borrowings, influence both the pattern of economic activity and also the level and growth of aggregate...

The changes-in-changes model extends the widely used difference-in-differences to situations where outcomes may evolve heterogeneously. Contrary to difference-in-differences, this model is invariant to the scaling of the outcome. This paper develops an instrumental variable changes-in-changes...

Between 1998 and 2008, the immigrant share in Spain jumped from less than 3 % to more than 13 %. We provide bounds on the effect of immigration inflows on natives’ election outcomes by considering alternative assumptions about nationalized immigrants’ participation rates and voting behavior....

This paper gives a test of overidentifying restrictions that is robust to many instruments and heteroskedasticity. It is based on a jackknife version of the overidentifying test statistic. Correct asymptotic critical values are derived for this statistic when the number of instruments grows...