Owners of intellectual property or mere sponsors of an idea (e.g., authors, security issuers, sponsors of standards) often need to persuade potential buyers or adopters of the worth of their property or idea. To this purpose, they often resort to more or less independent certifiers. This paper...

This paper exposits and relates two distinct approaches to bounding the average treatment effect. One approach, based on instrumental variables, is due to Manski (1990, 1994), who derives tight bounds on the average treatment effect under a mean independence form of the instrumental variables...

This paper studies the interactions between an individual's self esteem and his social environment in the workplace, at school, and in personal relationships. Because a person generally has only imperfect knowledge of his own abilities, people who derive benefits from his performance (parent,...

This paper estimates a dynamic model of schooling attainment to investigate the sources of discrepancy by race and ethnicity in college attendance. When the returns to college education rose, college enrollment of whites responded much more quickly than that of minorities. Parental income is a...

This paper considers the problem of policy evaluation in a modern society with heterogeneous agents and diverse groups with conflicting interests. Several different approaches to the policy evaluation problem are compared including the approach adopted in modern welfare economics, the classical...

This paper surveys new methods for estimatifg labor supply functions. A unified framework of analysis is presented. All recent models of labor supply are special cases of a general index function model developed for the analysis o dummy endogenous variables

This paper presents new econometric methods for the empirical analysis of individual labor market histories. The techniques developed here extend previous work on continuous time models in four ways: (1) A structural economic interpretation of these models is presented. (2) Time varying...

In recent years, the study of labor supply has occupied the attention of a large number of economists. With the growth in interest in the topic and with the inevitable diversity of economic models and statistical methods proposed by new entrants in the field, the literature has developed its own...

In this paper, we discuss statistical problems that arise in studying sequences of quantal responses (e.g., labor force participation) in panel data on heterogeneous populations (i.e., populations in which there is unobserved variation in response probabilities). Assuming that response...

This paper analyzes the possibility and the consequences of rational bubbles in a dy- namic economy where financially constrained firms demand and supply liquidity. Bub- bles are more likely to emerge, the scarcer the supply of outside liquidity and the more limited the pledgeability of...