We use a credible regression discontinuity design to estimate causal education effects. Pupils in the Swiss education system had to pass a centrally organized exam that classified them into different levels of secondary school, and that ultimately determined their educational degree. A major...

The paper explores weak monotonicity and convexity assumptions in a model for the decision to smoke with endogenous schooling. Theories of productive and allocative efficiency as well as the influence of time preferences are accounted for in order to derive testable constraints that bound the...

There is an ongoing discussion especially among political scientists and economists whether and how climate variability affects civil conflicts and wars in developing countries. Given the predicted climatic changes, several studies argue that increasing temperatures or decreasing precipitation...

We estimate the causal effect of having full health insurance on health care expenditures. We take advantage of a unique quasi-experimental setup in which deductibles and co- payments were zero in a managed care plan, and non-zero in regular insurance, until a policy change forced all...

Traditional tools of welfare economics identify the envy-related welfare loss from conspicuous consumption only under very strong assumptions. Measured income and life satisfaction offers an alternative for estimating such consumption externalities. The approach is developed in the context of...

The bivariate probit model is frequently used for estimating the effect of an endogenous binary regressor (the "treatment") on a binary health outcome variable. This paper discusses simple modifications that maintain the probit assumption for the marginal distributions while introducing...

When a sample combines data from two or more groups, multivariate regression yields a matrix-weighted average of the group-specific coefficient vectors. However, it is possible that the weighted average of a specific coefficient falls outside the range of the group-specific coefficients, and it...

This paper explores an algebraic relationship between two types of coefficients for a regression with several predictors and a group structure. In a general regression, the regression coefficients are allowed to be group-specific, the restricted regression imposes constant coefficients. The key...

This paper explores an algebraic relationship between two types of coefficients for a regression with several predictors and an additive binary group variable. In a general regression, the regression coefficients are allowed to be group-specific, the restricted regression imposes constant...

Regression models for proportions are frequently encountered in applied work. The conditional expectation is bound between 0 and 1 and, therefore, must be non-linear which requires non-standard panel data extensions. The quasi-maximum likelihood estimator of Papke and Wooldridge (1996) suffers...