Working papers

We propose a new approach to computation of NPMLEs for binary response models that signicantly increase their computational tractability thereby facilitating greater exibility in applications.

Birth weight is the most widely used indicator of neonatal health. It has been consistently shown to relate to a variety of outcomes throughout the life cycle. Lower birth weight babies have worse health and cognition from childhood, lower educational attainment, wages, and longevity. But what's in birth weight? What are the aspects of the prenatal environment that birth weight actually reflect?

We study social learning in a continuous action space experiment. Subjects, acting in sequence, state their belief about the value of a good, after observing their predecessors' statements and a private signal.

This paper reconciles the asymptotic disagreement between Bayesian and frequentist inference in set-identified models by adopting a multiple-prior (robust) Bayesian approach.

Let Y be an outcome of interest, X a vector of treatment measures, and W a vector of pre-treatment control variables.

Many econometric models used in applied work integrate over unobserved heterogeneity. We show that a class of these models that includes many random coefficients demand systems can be approximated by a "small-sigma" expansion that yields a straightforward 2SLS estimator. We study in detail the models of market shares popular in empirical IO ("macro BLP").

We study the effectiveness of a community-level information and mobilization intervention to reduce open defecation (OD) and increase sanitation investments in Nigeria. The results of a cluster-randomized control trial in 246 communities, conducted between 2014 and 2018, suggest that average impacts are exiguous.

We study the relationship between child work and cognitive development in four Low and Middle Income Countries.

This paper provides an empirical account of the dynamic payoff to work and how it is affected by taxes and transfers.

We study how parental leave benefit levels affect household labor supply, family income, and child outcomes, exploiting the Speed Premium (SP) in the Swedish leave system.

There have been many studies of the impact of higher education (HE) on the wages and earnings of graduates. However, for working women, the variation in wages only explains 30% of the variance in net family income. To understand the overall impact of HE on the living standards of female graduates, this paper explores the wider impact of HE.

This paper considers the problem of testing many moment inequalities where the number of moment inequalities, denoted by p, is possibly much larger than the sample size n.

While poverty may impair decision-making, some of the apparently irrational behaviour observed among the poor may have a rational expectation. In particular, estimates of "present-bias" among the poor may be exaggerated if poor individuals are credit-constrained and expect to have greater liquidity in future. I conduct an experiment in rural Pakistan which provides evidence of this effect.

We propose a framework for estimation and inference about the parameters of an economic model and predictions based on it, when the model may be misspecified.

It is almost self-evident that social interactions can determine economic behavior and outcomes. Yet, information on social ties does not exist in most publicly available and widely used datasets. We present results on the identification of social networks from observational panel data that contains no information on social ties between agents.

We examine changes in inequality in socio-emotional skills very early in life in two British cohorts born 30 years apart. We construct socio-emotional scales comparable across cohorts for both boys and girls, using two validated instruments for the measurement of child behaviour.

This paper studies regulatory policy interventions aimed at protecting vulnerable consumers who are disengaged and thus exposed to exploitation. We model heterogeneous consumer switching costs alongside asymmetric market shares.

With the aim of determining the welfare implications of price change in consumption data, we introduce a revealed preference relation over prices. We show that an absence of cycles in this preference relation characterizes a model of demand where consumers trade-off the utility of consumption against the disutility of expenditure.

Currently there is little practical advice on which treatment effect estimator to use when trying to adjust for observable differences. A recent suggestion is to compare the performance of estimators in simulations that somehow mimic the empirical context. Two ways to run such ‘empirical Monte Carlo studies’ (EMCS) have been proposed.

Ration shop systems allow households to purchase limited quantities of some commodities at a fixed subsidized price and are in widespread use throughout the developing world. I construct a model of piece-wise increasing commodity taxation to consider whether the use of ration shops can be rationalized by the characteristics of developing countries: limited government capacity to observe household incomes and high commodity price risk.