This paper studies the causal effect of sharing a common native language on international trade. Switzerland is a multilingual country that hosts four official language groups of which three are major (French, German, and Italian). These groups of native language speakers are geographically...

This paper illustrates that the generalized propensity score method can easily be applied with multiple continuous endogenous treatment variables. Consistency proofs carry over straightforwardly to this general case, and the approach is shown to work well in finite samples with various...

In this paper, we assess the role of skilled versus unskilled migration for bilateral trade using a flexible reduced-form model where the stocks of skilled and unskilled migrants at the country-pair level are determined as endogenous continuous treatments. The impact of different levels of...

We estimate the effects of active labour market policies (ALMP) on subsequent employment by nonparametric instrumental variables and matching estimators. Very informative administrative Swiss data with detailed regional information are combined with exogenous regional variation in programme...

Socio-economic interrelationships among regions can be measured in terms of economic flows, migration, or physical geographically-based measures, such as distance or length of shared areal unit boundaries. In general, proximity and openness tend to favour a similar economic performance among...

This paper considers the semiparametric identification of endogenous and exogenous peer effects based on group size variation. We show that Lee (2006)’s linear-in-means model is generically identified, even when all members of the group are not observed. While unnecessary in general,...

The market for commercial properties is characterised by extreme heterogeneity in demand. In this paper, we aim to gain more insight in the heterogeneity in demand for employment agglomeration and size of the rental property using a two-stage hedonic approach following Bajari and Benkard (2005)....

This paper assesses the strength of productivity spillovers non-parametrically in a data-set of 12 industries and 231 NUTS2 regions in 17 European Union member countries between 1992 and 2006. It devotes particular attention to measuring catching up through spillovers depending on the technology...

Many studies have estimated the effect of taxes on taxable income. To account for nonlinear taxes these studies either use instrumental variables approaches that are not fully consistent, or impose strong functional form assumptions. None allow for general heterogeneity in preferences. In this...