Environmental federalism refers to the debate over the "optimal" level of government at which to delegate environmental policymaking. Although this issue receives widespread attention across the globe, opinions run the gamut. The diversity of views plays out in practice as well as different...

Researchers in economics and other disciplines are often interested in the causal effect of a binary treatment on outcomes. Econometric methods used to estimate such effects are divided into one of two strands depending on whether they require the conditional independence assumption (i.e.,...

It is increasingly common in empirical research to merge data sets containing different units of observation. When the units are not nested, a crosswalk specifying how the units from one data source are allocated to the units of the other is needed. Unfortunately, most crosswalks are ad hoc, a...

In this paper nonparametric techniques are used to estimate higher-order moments of technical efficiency. The procedures developed in this paper allow the moments to be estimated with relative ease, while at the same not requiring restrictive assumptions on the distribution of inefficiency. The...

In this paper we compare two flexible estimators of technical efficiency in a cross-sectional setting: the nonparametric kernel SFA estimator of Fan, Li and Weersink (1996) to the nonparametric bias corrected DEA estimator of Kneip, Simar and Wilson (2008). We assess the finite sample...

This paper offers some new directions in the analysis of nonparamertric models with exogenous treatment assignment. The nonparametric approach opens the door to the examination of potentially different distributed outcomes. When combined with cross-validation, it also identifies potentially...