Using a global panel on research and development (R&D) expenditures, this paper documents that on average poor countries do far less R&D than rich as a share of GDP. This is arguably counter intuitive since the gains from doing the R&D required for technological catch up are thought to be very...

I review recent work in the statistics literature on instrumental variables methods from an econometrics perspective. I discuss some of the older, economic, applications including supply and demand models and relate them to the recent applications in settings of randomized experiments with...

This paper estimates the impact of elite school attendance on long-run outcomes including completed education, income and fertility. Our data consists of individuals born in the 1950s and educated in a UK district that assigned students to either elite or non-elite secondary schools. Using...

We introduce a new 'supply-push' instrument for foreign aid, to be used together with an instrumental variable estimator that filters out unobserved common factors. We use this instrument to study the effects of aid on macroeconomic ratios, and especially the ratios of consumption, investment,...

In finite samples, the use of a slightly endogenous but highly relevant instrument can reduce mean-squared error (MSE). Building on this observation, I propose a moment selection criterion for GMM in which moment conditions are chosen based on the MSE of their associated estimators rather than...

Canadian health care spending as risen as a percent of GDP almost every year since statistics on the subject were collected. Over this time frame Canadian incomes have also risen significantly as well. Determining whether the cause of these increases is a demand-sided problem as a result of...

This paper analyzes how apprenticeship training, i.e., work-based secondary education, affects personality traits compared to full-time school-based vocational or general education. Employing an instrumental variable approach that exploits the regional differences in the relative weight of...

There is a substantial debate over the direction of the causal relation between income and health. This is important for our understanding of the health production process and for the policy debate over improving healthcare. We instrument income with rainfall measurements by matching satellite...

A graph of environmental degradation versus income often has an inverted-U shape. Some policy analysts hypothesize that there is a causal relationship between income and environmental degradation, yielding this shape and suggesting that the solution to environmental problems is to alleviate...