Economists have long been sceptical of claims about the 'death of distance' - the idea that new technology has diminished the significance of geography for economic outcomes. Research by Sokbae Lee, Rachel Griffith and John Van Reenen, which looks at patent citations over a quarter of a century,...

Studies have shown a decreasing trend in the U.S. gender earnings gap since the 1980s. The authors work with a framework established by Blau and Kahn (1997 JOLE; 2006 ILRR), who used the Michigan Panel of Income Dynamics (PSID) to decompose that gap into observable and unobservable components in...

This paper develops a concrete formula for the asymptotic distribution of two-step, possibly non-smooth semiparametric M-estimators under general misspecification. Our regularity conditions are relatively straightforward to verify and also weaker than those available in the literature. The...

Economic theory suggests that an extension of the maximum length of entitlement for unemployment benefits increases the duration of unemployment. Empirical results for the reform of the unemployment compensation system in Germany during the 1980s are less clear. The analysis in this paper is...

This paper is concerned with inference about a function g that is identified by a conditional quantile restriction involving instrumental variables. The paper presents a test of the hypothesis that g belongs to a finite-dimensional parametric family against a nonparametric alternative. The test...

This paper extends the method of local instrumental variables developed by Heckman and Vytlacil [Heckman, J., Vytlacil E., 2005. Structural equations, treatment, effects and econometric policy evaluation. Econometrica 73(3), 669-738] to the estimation of not only means, but also distributions of...