Does trade openness cause higher GDP per capita? Since the seminal instrumental variables (IV) estimates of Frankel and Romer [F&R](1999) important doubts have surfaced. Is the correlation spurious and driven by omitted geographical and institutional variables? In this paper, we generalize F&R's...

This paper examines the causal effect of childcare provision on grandparents' health in the US. We propose the sex ratio among older adults' children as a novel instrument for grandparental childcare provision. Our instrument is rooted in the demographic literature on grandparenthood and...

We discuss Bayesian inferential procedures within the family of instrumental variables regression models and focus on two issues: existence conditions for posterior moments of the parameters of interest under a flat prior and the potential of Direct Monte Carlo (DMC) approaches for efficient...

Since identification, instrumental variables and variables exclusion, core concepts in econometrics, are entwined, several questions arise: How is identification related to the existence of IVs? How are identification criteria related to omitted variables? Is omission/inclusion of variables from...

Estimating the effect of inequality on crime is challenging due to reverse causality and omitted variable bias. This paper addresses these concerns by exploiting the fact that, as suggested by recent scholarly research, the legacy of slavery is largely manifested in persistent levels of economic...

The instrumental variable quantile regression (IVQR) model (Chernozhukov and Hansen (2005)) is a popular tool for estimating causal quantile effects with endogenous covariates. However, estimation is complicated by the nonsmoothness and nonconvexity of the IVQR GMM objective function. This paper...

Estimating causal effects of parental characteristics on determinants of child outcomes is complicated due to endogeneity problems. Utilizing matched mother-child data from National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth, this paper integrates an orthogonalization technique to 2SLS-IV regressions. The...

We develop non-parametric instrumental variable estimation and inferential theory for econometric models with possibly endogenous regressors whose coefficients can vary over time either deterministically or stochastically, and the time-varying and uniform versions of the standard Hausman...

The following note proposes a simple procedure to estimate k parameters of interest in a linear model with potentially k conditionally endogenous variables of interest and m endogenous control variables in the presence of at least one instrumental variable under the assumption of conditional...