Most research questions in agricultural and applied economics are of a causal nature, i.e., how one or more variables (e.g., policies, prices, the weather) affect one or more other variables (e.g., the welfare of individuals or the society, the demanded or produced quantity, pollution). Only a...

This study empirically tests time-varying asset pricing models in an emerging market with individual stocks. We employ a recently proposed instrumental variables (IV) technique that uses individual stocks as test assets while consistently estimating ex-post risk premiums. This method differs...

This paper proposes the use of Bayesian inference techniques to search for and obtain valid instruments in dynamic panel data models where endogenous variables may exist. The use of Principal Component Analysis (PCA) allows for obtaining a reduced number of instruments in comparison to the high...

The role of friends in the US opioid epidemic is examined. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health (Add Health), adults aged 25-34 and their high school best friends are focused on. An instrumental variable technique is employed to estimate peer effects in opioid...

The age at which women become mothers for the first time is ever increasing in many industrialized countries. Therefore, fertility determinants that might deteriorate with age, such as health, and their effect on reproductive patterns, should be given more attention. We explore the effect of the...

Regularized regression methods have attracted much attention in the literature, mainly due to its application in high-dimensional variable selection problems. Most existing regularization methods assume that the predictors are directly observed and precisely measured. It is well known that in a...