The classical Heckman (1976, 1979) selection correction estimator (heckit) is misspecified and inconsistent if an interaction of the outcome variable and an explanatory variable matters for selection. To address this specification problem, a full information maximum likelihood estimator and a simple two-step estimator are developed. Monte-Carlo simulations illustrate that the bias of the ordina...

OLS estimation of an impulse-indicator coefficient is inconsistent, but its variance can be consistently estimated. Although the ratio of the inconsistent estimator to its standard error has a tdistribution, that test is inconsistent: one solution is to form an index of indicators. We provide Monte Carlo evidence that including a plethora of indicators need not distort model selection, permitti...

Absolute Risk Aversion and the Returns to Education Individual absolute risk aversion is measured for a sample of 1373 male household heads, using the 1995 wave of the Survey on the Income and Wealth of Italian households. This measure, conditional on financial and real wealth and household income, is used as an instrument for attained education in a standard log earnings equation. I find that,...

This paper estimates the intangible benefits of a two sports facilities in Columbus, Ohio on residential property values. We estimate a spatial hedonic model that avoids biased and inconsistent estimates in the presence of uncorrected spatial autocorrelation. The results suggest that the presence of sports facilities in Columbus have a significant positive distance-decaying effect on surroundin...

There are two broad classes of models used to address the econometric problems caused by skewness in data commonly encountered in health care applications: (1) transformation to deal with skewness (e.g., ordinary least square (OLS) on ln(y)); and (2) alternative weighting approaches based on exponential conditional models (ECM) and generalized linear model (GLM) approaches. In this paper, we en...

Relative performance evaluation has been suggested as a means to overcome information asymmetry between regulators and organizations when assessing e ciency. By comparing similar organizations the relationship between costs and e€ ort can be better isolated. The English Department of Health (DoH) has undertaken relative performance evaluation in comparing the unit costs of acute hospitals usin...

The asymptotic efficiency of OLS and IV estimators is examined in a simple dynamic structural model with a constant and two explanatory variables: the lagged dependent variable and another autoregressive variable, which may also include lagged or instantaneous feedbacks from the dependent variable. The parameter values are such that all variables are stationary. The asymptotic efficiency of OLS...

We propose and derive the asymptotic distribution of a tapered narrow-band least squares estimator (NBLSE) of the cointegration parameter in the framework of fractional cointegration. This tapered estimator is invariant to deterministic polynomial trends. In particular, we allow for arbitrary linear time trends that often occur in practice. Our simulations show that, in the case of no determini...

The Impact of Alcohol Consumption on Occupational Attainment in England In this study we provide evidence on the effect of alcohol consumption on occupational attainment in England. To do this we use samples of employees from the Health Survey for England between 1992 and 1996. We find that due to the endogenous nature of alcohol consumption, OLS estimates may provide a biased picture of the im...

In this paper, we estimate a health care demand function for 18 OECD countries for the period 1972-1995. We consider a demand side approach where health expenditure depend on per capita GDP and the relative price of health care. We use panel data unit root and stationarity tests to characterize our data. Then, we test cointegration between our variables with Kao[16] panel data cointegration tes...