While historians of economics have noted the transition toward empirical work in economics since the 1970s, less understood is the shift toward "quasi-experimental" methods in applied microeconomics. Angrist and Pischke (2010) trumpet the wide application of these methods as a "credibility...

We develop a nonparametric instrumental variable approach for the estimation of average treatment effects on hazard rates and conditional survival probabilities, without model structure. We derive constructive identification proofs for average treatment effects under noncompliance and dynamic...

There is little consensus on the capacity for foreign aid to cause economic growth in developing countries. This is due in large part to the fact that foreign aid recipients are selected by donors, confounding identification. This paper proposes an identification strategy that exploits exogenous...

We study the effect of institutional ownership on firm coverage by equity analysts. To account for the endogeneity of institutional ownership we employ instrumental variable approach. Acquisition for cash of a company from an institutional investor's portfolio serves as an exogenous shock to the...

This paper reexamines the causal link between institutional quality and economic development using "Malaria Endemicity" as an instrument for institutions. This instrument is superior to the previously used instruments in the literature which suffered from measurement error, including "settler...

This paper analyzes the effects of institutions on economic development, and focuses on separating political institutions from contracting and economic institutions. For a sample of former European colonies, I find that differences in income levels are strongly affected by political...

The mean squared prediction error of the linear regression model is examined when estimation is performed with instrumental variables. It is shown that increasing the number of instruments in the estimation procedure, can reduce the mean squared prediction error of the model through more...

We study the effect of institutional ownership on firm coverage by equity analysts. To account for the endogeneity of institutional ownership we employ instrumental variable approach. Acquisition for cash of a company from an institutional investor's portfolio serves as an exogenous shock to the...

The ill-posedness of the inverse problem of recovering a regression function in a nonparametric instrumental variable (NPIV) model leads to estimators that may suffer from poor statistical performance. In this paper, we explore the possibility of imposing shape restrictions to improve the...

The diversion of development aid to the recipient's military may be one explanation why aid is often found to be ineffective in promoting economic growth and development. Previous studies have not derived the causal effects of development aid on military expenditure. Using a new instrumental...