Instrumental Variables (IV) methods identify internally valid causal effects for individuals whose treatment status is manipulable by the instrument at hand. Inference for other populations requires homogeneity assumptions. This paper outlines a theoretical framework that nests causal...

Human capital investments at an early age appear crucial for individual outcomes. Family size might affect these investments influencing parental time and economic resources invested in children's education. This aspect is related to the children quantity-quality trade-off proposed by Becker...

Using data for 9, 13 and 15-year-old students from three different datasets (PIRLS-2006, TIMSS-2007 and PISA-2009), we investigate whether the age at school entry affects children school performance at the fourth, eighth and tenth grade levels. Since student's age in a grade may be endogenous,...

In this paper we empirically study the relationship between education attainment and Body Mass Index (BMI), using as theoretical reference an energy balance model. Our data consist of individual level data from eight waves of the Italian survey on life-styles. We use Quantile Regression (QR)...

This chapter considers methods for evaluating the impact of social programs in the presence of nonrandom program placement or program selection. It first presents the evaluation problem as a missing data problem and then considers various solutions proposed in the statistics and econometrics...

In this article, we review quantile models with endogeneity. We focus on models that achieve indentification through the use of instrumental variables and discuss conditions under which partial and point identification are obtained. We discuss key conditions, which include monotonicity and...

We provide an overidentification test for a nonparametric treatment model where individuals are allowed to select into treatment based on unobserved gains. Our test can be used to test the validity of instruments in a framework with essential heterogeneity (Imbens and Angrist 1994). The...

Structural econometric methods are often criticized for being sensitive to functional form assumptions. We study parametric estimators of the local average treatment effect (LATE) derived from a widely used class of latent threshold crossing models and show they yield LATE estimates...