It is common in studies of individual choice behavior to report averages of the behavior under consideration. In the social sciences the mean is, indeed, often the quantity of interest, but at times focusing on the mean can be misleading. For example, it is well known in labor economics that...

We propose and analyze a generalization of present value maximization, 'time-order dependent present value (TODPV),' for intertemporal income choice. The model is analagous to the rank dependent expected utility model (RDEU) for choice under risk. The main feature of interest in the model is the...

This paper employs conditional second moments to identify the impact of education in wage regressions where education is treated as endogenous. This approach avoids the use of instrumental variables in a setting where instruments are frequently not available. We employ this methodology to...

This paper provides a control function estimator to adjust for endogeneity in the triangular simultaneous equations model where there are no available exclusion restrictions to generate suitable instruments. Our approach is to exploit the dependence of the errors on exogenous variables (e.g....

This paper investigates the degree of intergenerational transmission of education for individuals from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979. Rather than identifying the causal effect of parental education via instrumental variables we exploit the feature of the transmission mechanism...

This paper formulates a likelihood-based estimator for a double index, semiparametric binary response equation. A novel feature of this estimator is that it is based on density estimation under local smoothing. While the proofs differ from those based on alternative density estimators, the...

An innovation which bypasses the need for instruments when estimating endogenous treatment effects is identification via conditional second moments. The most general of these approaches is Klein and Vella (2010) which models the conditional variances semiparametrically. While this is attractive,...

We use panel data from the US Health and Retirement Study 1992-2002 to estimate the effect of self-assessed health limitations on active labor market participation of men around retirement age. Self-assessments of health and functioning typically introduce an endogeneity bias when studying the...