The paper investigates the effects of nursing overtime on nosocomial infections and medical accidents in a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). The literature lacks clear evidence on this issue and we conjecture that this may be due to empirical and methodological factors. We thus focus on a...

Prior empirical research on the theoretically proposed interaction between the quantity and the quality of children builds on exogenous variation in family size due to twin births and focuses on human capital outcomes. The typical finding can be described as a statistically nonsignificant...

In this article we overview nonparametric (spline and kernel) regression methods and illustrate how they may be used in labor economic applications. We focus our attention on issues commonly found in the labor literature such as how to account for endogeneity via instrumental variables in a...

This paper offers some new directions in the analysis of nonparamertric models with exogenous treatment assignment. The nonparametric approach opens the door to the examination of potentially different distributed outcomes. When combined with cross-validation, it also identifies potentially...

This paper shows nonparametric identification of quantile treatment effects (QTE) in the regression discontinuity design. The distributional impacts of social programs such as welfare, education, training programs and unemployment insurance are of large interest to economists. QTE are an...

In this paper we consider nonparametric estimation of a structural equation model under full additivity constraint. We propose estimators for both the conditional mean and gradient which are consistent, asymptotically normal, oracle efficient and free from the curse of dimensionality. Monte...

This paper proposes new ℓ1-penalized quantile regression estimators for panel data, which explicitly allows for individual heterogeneity associated with covariates. We conduct Monte Carlo simulations to assess the small sample performance of the new estimators and provide comparisons of new...

This paper shows nonparametric identification of quantile treatment effects (QTE) in the regression discontinuity design (RDD) and proposes simple estimators. Quantile treatment effects are a very helpful tool to characterize the effects of certain interventions on the outcome distribution. The...

Using a novel modeling approach, and cross-country firm level data for the textiles industry, we examine the impact of institutional quality on firm performance. Our methodology allows us to estimate the marginal impact of institutional quality on productivity of each firm. Our results bring...

Economic conditions such as convexity, homogeneity, homotheticity, and monotonicity are all important assumptions or consequences of assumptions of economic functionals to be estimated. Recent research has seen a renewed interest in imposing constraints in nonparametric regression. We survey the...