We explore theoretical foundations and issues in the empirical estimation of conflict technologies. Such technologies are probabilistic choice functions that depend on the military capacities of adversaries, where the military capacities themselves depend on economic inputs via ordinary production functions. Different classes of functional forms can be derived stochastically or axiomatically. T...

This paper presents some two-step estimators for a wide range of parametric panel data models with censored endogenous variables and sample selection bias. Our approach is to derive estimates of the unobserved heterogeneity responsible for the endogeneity/selection bias to include as additional explanatory variables in the primary equation. These are obtained through a decomposition of the redu...

Prior research has examined audit pricing for publicly held firms and provided some evidence of a Big 8 premium in pricing. We investigate audit pricing among private firms for the first time, and we compare audit pricing for private and listed clients. The relatively great degree of dispersion in auditor choice (between Big 5 and non-Big 5 auditors) in our large sample of privately held audit ...

Global games with endogenous information often exhibit multiple equilibria. In this paper, we show how one can nevertheless identify useful predictions that are robust across all equilibria and that cannot be delivered in the commonknowledge counterparts of these games. Our analysis is conducted within a flexible family of games of regime change, which have been used to model, inter alia, specu...

We study the impact of physician workload on hospital reimbursement utilizing a detailed data set from the trauma department of a major urban hospital. We find that the proportion of patients assigned a “highseverity” status for reimbursement purposes, which maps, on average, to a 47.8% higher payment for the hospital, is substantially reduced as the workload of the discharging physician increa...

This paper investigates how newspaper consumption a ects political engagement. To circumvent potential endogeneity issues, I use variation in European languages as an instrument for newspaper consumption. Speci cally, I consider variation in how much physical space languages require to express some given information content. I rst estimate such language e ciency from large bilingual text compil...

We use single equation and system instrumental variable models to explore if individuals smoke during times of stress (the motivation effect) and if they are successful in self-medicating short-term stress (the self-medication effect). Short-term stress is a powerful motivator of smoking, and the decision to smoke could trigger biological feedback that immediately reduces short-term stress. We ...