We study the determinants of youth crime using a dynamic discrete choice model of crime and education. We allow past education and criminal activities to affect current crime and educational decisions. We take advantage of a rich panel dataset on serious juvenile offenders, the Pathways to...

This paper provides a general description of the relationship between individual decision problems and aggregate crime regressions. The analysis is designed to elucidate the behavioral and statistical assumptions that are implicit in the use of aggregate crime regressions for both the analysis...

In an effort to explain the observed heterogeneity in the exporting decisions of rms, the empirical trade literature has concluded that exporting rms are more productive than non-exporting rms. In this paper, I show that the foundation for this conclusion is weak, given that the productivity...

The estimation of production functions suffers from an unresolved identification problem caused by flexible inputs, such as intermediate inputs. We develop an identification strategy for production functions based on a transformation of the firm’s short-run first order condition that solves...

Increasingly, grade retention is viewed as an important alternative to social promotion, yet evidence to date is unable to disentangle how the effect of grade retention varies by abilities and over time. The key challenge is differential selection of students into retention across grades and by...

I use economic theory and estimates of a semiparametrically identied structural model to analyze the role played by credit constraints, uncertainty and preferences in explaining college attendance. A methodology for inferring information available to the agent from individual choices is proposed...

This paper contributes to a growing literature that attempts to determine whether disparities in police stops and searches of potential criminals of different races stem from taste-based discrimination. The key challenge in making this evaluation is that police officers have more information...

This paper examines how estimates of the deterrent effect of capital punishment depend on alternate choices of assumptions concerning the homicide process. Specific models of the homicide process represent bundles of these assumptions, which involve the unobserved heterogeneity, the relevant...

Objectives: Investigate how different model assumptions have driven the conflicting findings in the literature on the deterrence effect of capital punishment. Methods: The deterrence effect of capital punishment is estimated across different models that reflect the following sources of model...

A serious difficulty in determining the importance of credit constraints in education arises because standard data sources do not provide a direct way of identifying which students are credit constrained. This paper differentiates itself from previous work by taking a direct approach for...