Many empirical questions in economics and other social sciences depend on causal effects of programs or policies. In the last two decades much research has been done on the econometric and statistical analysis of the effects of such programs or treatments. This recent theoretical literature has built on, and combined features of, earlier work in both the statistics and econometrics literatures....

The aim of this paper is to analyze the effect of the accessibility to employment offices on local unemployment rates according to the distribution of three different types of municipalities: large urban, small urban and non-urban. We built a new accessibility measure taking into account the number of employment offices together with the distance and size of their catchment area. We propose an ...

Heterogeneous Treatment Effects: Instrumental Variables without Monotonicity? A fundamental identification problem in program evaluation arises when idiosyncratic gains from participation and the treatment decision depend on each other. Imbens and Angrist (1994) were the first to exploit a monotonicity condition in order to identify an average treatment effect parameter using instrumental varia...

Article history: Received 1 October 2013 Received in revised form 1 October 2014 Accepted 5 November 2014 Available online 4 February 2015 This paper investigates the effects of software intellectual property rights (IPRs) on the performance of software firms. For this, technical efficiency scores for Korean software firms are examined, and for an empirical analysis, data envelopment analysis (...

Long-Run Labour Market Effects of Individual Sports Activities This microeconometric study analyzes the effects of individual leisure sports participation on long-term labour market variables, on socio-demographic as well as on health and subjective well-being indicators for West Germany based on individual data from the German SocioEconomic Panel study (GSOEP) 1984 to 2006. Econometric problem...

In this paper, we argue that study of the effect of financial development and shocks on aggregate growth volatility will not be informative because they affect growth volatility through its different components. Financial development affects only the business cycle component of volatility and therefore, the effect on total volatility is dependent on its share in total volatility. On the contrar...

An understanding of the spatial dimension of economic and social activity requires methods that can separate out the relationship between spatial units that is due to the effect of common factors from that which is purely spatial even in an abstract sense. The same applies to the empirical analysis of networks in general. We are able to distinguish between cross-sectional strong dependence and ...

This paper follows on from the discussion of Florax, Folmer and Rey (2003) on the advantages and disadvantages of various specification strategies for econometric models in a spatial setting. Habitual practise has popularised a technique based on the well-known Lagrange Multipliers, which seems to give good results although its basis is entirely ad hoc. In this paper we also contemplate other a...

We study semiparametric two-step estimators which have the same structure as parametric doubly robust estimators in their second step, but retain a fully nonparametric specification in the first step. Such estimators exist in many economic applications, including a wide range of missing data and treatment effect models. We show that these estimators are √ n-consistent and asymptotically normal ...

The Finite Sample Performance of Semiand Nonparametric Estimators for Treatment Effects and Policy Evaluation This paper investigates the finite sample performance of a comprehensive set of semiand nonparametric estimators for treatment and policy evaluation. In contrast to previous simulation studies which mostly considered semiparametric approaches relying on parametric propensity score estim...