Do Peers Affect Student Achievement? Evidence from Canada Using Group Size Variation We provide the first empirical application of a new approach proposed by Lee (2007) to estimate peer effects in a linear-in-means model. This approach allows to control for grouplevel unobservables and to solve the reflection problem. We investigate peer effects in student achievement in Mathematics, Science, F...

A Caseworker Like Me: Does the Similarity between Unemployed and Caseworker Increase Job Placements? This paper examines whether the chances of job placements improve if unemployed persons are counselled by caseworkers who belong to the same social group, defined by gender, age, education, and nationality. Based on an unusually informative dataset, which links Swiss unemployed to their casework...

This paper uses the adaptive Lasso estimator to determine variables important for economic growth. The adaptive Lasso estimator is a computationally very efficient procedure that simultaneously performs model selection and parameter estimation. The computational cost of this method is negligibly small compared with standard approaches in the growth regressions literature. We apply this method f...

Market Stress and Herding* We propose a new approach to detecting and measuring herding which is based on the cross-sectional dispersion of the factor sensitivity of assets within a given market. This method enables us to evaluate if there is herding towards particular sectors or styles in the market including the market index itself and critically we can also separate such herding from common ...

Health Care Expenditure and Income in the OECD Reconsidered: Evidence from Panel Data This paper reconsiders the long-run economic relationship between health care expenditure and income using a panel of 20 OECD countries observed over the period 1971-2004. In particular, the paper studies the non-stationarity and cointegration properties between health care spending and income. This is done in...

Peer Effects and Social Networks in Education This paper studies whether structural properties of friendship networks affect individual outcomes in education. We first develop a model that shows that, at the Nash equilibrium, the outcome of each individual embedded in a network is proportional to her Katz-Bonacich centrality measure. This measure takes into account both direct and indirect frie...

What is the magnitude of credit constraint or credit gap affecting small businesses? This paper provides estimates of credit gap, defined as the difference between the desired and actual levels of debt for credit-constrained small businesses using the data from the National Survey of Small Business Finances. The estimated credit gap is approximately 20 percent – credit constrained small busines...

Comparative Advantage, Segmentation and Informal Earnings: A Marginal Treatment Effects Approach This paper employs recently developed econometric models of marginal treatment effects to analyze the relevance of labor market comparative advantage and segmentation in the participation and earnings performance of workers in formal and informal jobs in Argentina. A novel household data set on info...

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 ...

Hedonic Estimation under Very General Conditions Using Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Designs This paper develops a generalized hedonic model in which an exogenous shock to a single product attribute can affect other attributes, the markets for the product’s complements and substitutes, and aggregate quantity produced. These factors are shown to be empirically relevant and to cause bias in...