Additional private schooling within a nation-state may increase citizens' political and economic freedom through increased educational quality, balanced power relationships, and increased civic engagement.We employ a two-stage-least-squares time and country-level fixed-effects analytical...

This paper considers estimation and inference concerning the autoregressive coefficient (ρ) in a panel autoregression for which the degree of persistence in the time dimension is unknown. The main objective is to construct confidence intervals for ρ that are asymptotically valid, having...

Agglomeration economies are among the most important factors in increasing firm productivity. However, there is little evidence supportive of this in Africa. Using the firm registry database in Tanzania, this paper examines a new application of the logit approach with two empirical issues taken...

This paper discusses the empirical content of the exogeneity (zero-covariance) assumption, the key assumption for identification in the linear IV model. Contrary to the general belief, we show that whenever the outcome is bounded, the exogeneity assumption imposes some testable restrictions on...

We link genetic diversity in the country of origin of the firms' board members with corporate performance via board members' nationality. We hypothesize that our approach captures deep-rooted differences in cultural, institutional, social, psychological, physiological, and other traits that...

This paper is the first to use the method of instrumental variables to estimate the causal impact of youth obesity on U.S. medical care costs. We examine data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey for 2001-2013 and instrument for child BMI using the BMI of the child's biological mother. IV...

We propose a method for using instrumental variables (IV) to draw inference about causal effects for individuals other than those affected by the instrument at hand. Policy relevance and external validity turns on the ability to do this reliably. Our method exploits the insight that both the IV...

This study considers the instrumental variable estimation of factor models. Specifically, we investigate the weak instruments problem, which is not well investigated in the literature, in detail. We show that the signal-to-noise ratios, which are defined by the variance ratios of the common...

In this paper, we consider the instrumental variables (IV) estimation of factor models. In the psychometrics literature, although the two-stage least squares (2SLS) estimator is routinely used in IV estimation of factor models, alternative estimators have been proposed in the econometrics...

We employ EU-SILC micro data for Latvia to study how returns to education changed during the economic crisis of 2008-2009 and afterwards. We found that returns to education increased significantly during the crisis and decreased slightly during the subsequent economic recovery. The...