Most evidence on foreclosure spillovers identifies localized effects that are modest in magnitude, but these effects could multiply to larger aggregate effects across broad neighborhoods. We test this proposition developing a proxy for the fraction of mortgages in negative equity during the...

This study examines the effects of negative equity on children's academic performance, using data on children attending Florida public schools and housing transactions from the State of Florida. Our empirical strategy exploits variation over time in the timing of family moves to Florida in order...

This paper uses the marginal treatment effect (MTE) to unify the nonparametric literature on treatment effects with the econometric literature on structural estimation using a nonparametric analog of a policy invariant parameter; to generate a variety of treatment effects from a common...

This paper derives simply computed closed-form expressions for the Average Treatment Effect (ATE), the effect of Treatment on the Treated (TT), Local Average Treatment Effect (LATE) and Marginal Treatment Effect (MTE) in a latent variable framework for both normal and non-normal models. The...

This paper considers two problems that arise in determining the role of ability in explaining the level of and change in the rate of return to schooling. (1) Ability and schooling are so strongly dependent that it is not possible, over a wide range of variation in schooling and ability, to...

In The Bell Curve, Herrnstein and Murray argue that the U.S. economy is a meritocracy in which differences in wages (including differences across race and gender) are explained by differences in cognitive ability. In this paper we test their claim for wages conditional on occupation using a...

This paper examines the contribution of the rise in the return to ability to the rise in the economic return to education. All of the evidence on this question comes from panel data sets in which a small collection of adjacent birth cohorts is followed over time. The structure of the data...

This paper presents new evidence from the NLSY on the importance of meritocracy in American society. In it, we find that general intelligence, or g -- a measure of cognitive ability--is dominant in explaining test score variance. The weights assigned to tests by g are similar for all major...

We use the control function approach to identify the average treatment effect and the effect of treatment on the treated in models with a continuous endogenous regressor whose impact is heterogeneous. We assume a stochastic polynomial restriction on the form of the heterogeneity but, unlike...

We reanalyze data from the observational study by Connors et al. (1996) on the impact of Swan-Ganz catheterization on mortality outcomes. The Connors et al. (1996) study assumes that there are no unobserved differences between patients who are catheterized and patients who are not catheterized...