production planning in data envelopment analysis abstract the present paper extends prior researches on data envelopment dea based production planning in a centralized decision making environment in such an environment the production planning problem involves the participation of all individual units each contributing in part to the total production the production planning problem involves determining the number of products to be produced by all individual units in the next season when demand changes can be forecasted the current study is concerned with optimal production planning in a centralized decision making environment the approach proposed in this paper takes the size of operational units into consideration and the production level for each unit becomes proportional to the ability of the units the applicability of the proposed approach in real applications is illustrated empirically using two real cases

nonparametric bounds on the returns to language skills this paper applies the theoretical literature on nonparametric bounds on treatment effects to the estimation of how limited english proficiency lep affects wages and employment opportunities for hispanic workers in the united states i analyse the identifying power of several weak assumptions on treatment response and selection and stress the interactions between lep and education occupation and immigration status i show that the combination of two weak but credible assumptions provides informative upper bounds on the returns to language skills for certain subgroups of the population adding age at arrival as a monotone instrumental variable also provides informative lower bounds copyright 2005 john wiley sons ltd

information sharing in dea a cooperative game theory approach abstract in this paper a cooperative dea game is proposed based on the idea that different organizations can gain if they share data on the input consumption and output production of their processing units a larger data sample allows a more complete description of the production possibility set and consequently of the efficient frontier however since not all organizations will benefit in the same way it is convenient to use cooperative game theory in order to share the benefits of the cooperation the proposed cooperative dea game is shown to be subadditive and balanced models for computing the value of the game and checking its stability taking into account the exponential number of coalitions that exist when the number of organizations is large are also presented the approach is illustrated with a dataset from the literature

head start and the distribution of long term education and labor market outcomes we investigate the effect of head start on education and wage income for individuals in their 30s in the nlsy79 we contribute to the existing literature by examining effects across outcome distrib

financial aid debt management and socioeconomic outcomes post college effects of merit based aid abstract prior research has demonstrated that financial aid can influence both college enrollments and completions but less is known about its post college consequences this study is the first to link college and financial aid information to credit bureau data later in life enabling us to examine the impacts of grant aid on homeownership neighborhood characteristics and credit outcomes we use a regression discontinuity rd strategy to identify causal effects of the wv promise scholarship a broad based state merit aid program up to 10 years after college entry the rd is imperfect because our sample is limited to college students and the scholarship program increased enrollment but there is little evidence of selection on observables at the threshold we find that scholarship recipients near the test score cutoff for eligibility are more likely to earn a graduate degree are more likely to own a home and live in higher income neighborhoods effects on annual earnings and credit outcomes are similarly positive but imprecise these positive effects are primarily due to substantial reductions in time to degree rather than to reduced student debt upon graduation

micro data heterogeneity and the evaluation of public policy nobel lecture this paper summarizes the contributions of microeconometrics to economic knowledge four main themes are developed 1 microeconometricians developed new tools to respond to econometric problems raised by the analysis of the new sources of micro data produced after the second world war 2 microeconometrics improved on aggregate time series methods by building models that linked economic models for individuals to data on individual behavior 3 an important empirical regularity detected by the field is the diversity and heterogeneity of behavior this heterogeneity has profound consequences for economic theory and for econometric practice 4 microeconometrics has contributed substantially to the scientific evaluation of public policy

cost allocation and convex data envelopment abstract this paper considers allocation rules first we demonstrate that costs allocated by the aumann shapley and the friedman moulin cost allocation rules are easy to determine in practice using convex envelopment of registered cost data and parametric programming second from the linear programming problems involved it becomes clear that the allocation rules technically speaking allocate the non zero value of the dual variable for a convexity constraint on to the output vector hence the allocation rules can also be used to allocate inefficiencies in non parametric efficiency measurement models such as data envelopment analysis dea the convexity constraint of the bcc model introduces a non zero slack in the objective function of the multiplier problem and we show that the cost allocation rules discussed in this paper can be used as candidates to allocate this slack value on to the input or output variables and hence enable a full allocation of the inefficiency on to the input or output variables as in the ccr model

the estimation of wage gains and welfare gains in self selection models the authors modify the basic self sele ction model for the effects ofeducation training unions and other activities on wages by including heterogeneity of rewards to the activity i e diffe rences across individuals in the rate of return to the activity the authors sho w that such heterogeneity creates a new form of selectionbias they provide tes ts for its presence and draw out its implications for the wage and welfare gains to the activity an empirical application provides strong support for such hete rogeneityin one particular training program copyright 1987 by mit press

identification issues in the public private wage gap with an application to italy this paper reviews some of the standard assumptions that are imposed in order to estimate the average public private wage gap and that are mainly related to the possible selection of the sector there are two contributions to the existing public private wage gap literature one is a better understanding of the identified parameters standard estimators identify a local effect late which in general cannot be generalized to the entire population as instead is almost always done the other is the partial identification of the population average treatment effect with an instrumental variable to the best of my knowledge this is the first paper in this literature that employs bounds the technique is applied to male workers in italy for compliers late estimates a wage advantage from working in the public sector greater than 30 this return is within the narrowest bounds on the population average treatment effect that are consistent even with a much smaller gap about 15 or more

the middle income trap more politics than economics economists have identified the existence of a middle income mi trap but have yet to analyze the politics of this trap the authors argue that countries in the mi trap face two major institutional and political challenges first the policies necessary to upgrade productivity as in human capital and innovation require enormous investment in institutional capacity second these institutional challenges come at a time when political capacity for building these institutions is weak due primarily to the fragmentation of potential support coalitions politics are stalled in particular by fractured social groups especially business and labor and more generally by inequality these conditions result in large measure from previous trajectories of growth the empirical analysis concentrates on nine of the larger mi countries

assessing the case for social experiments rs ecent academic debates pit two alternative approaches to policy evaluation against one another the first is the experimental approach based on the random assignment of accepted program applicants to a recipient or treatment group and a non recipient or control group the second is the nonexperimental or econometric approach that uses a variety of microdata sources statistical methods and behavioral models to compare the outcomes of participants in social programs with those of nonparticipants the central question addressed in this paper is whether or not randomized social experiments aid in securing answers to basic questions about the evaluation of social programs there are many distinct and complementary approaches to the study of the impact of public policy including full general equilibrium analysis of policy impacts tinbergen 1956 auerbach and kotlikoff 1987 shoven and whalley 1992 kydland and prescott 1991 and less ambitious partial equilibrium microeconomic structural research programs such as those designed to estimate the impact of taxes on labor supply both approaches offer answers to many interesting counterfactual policy questions but their credibility rests critically on the quality of the empirical input used to generate their answers

goal programming data envelopment analysis godea for target based multi level planning allocating central grants to the greek local authorities abstract in this paper we develop an interface between goal programming and data envelopment analysis godea in order to integrate target setting and resource allocation in multi level planning problems data envelopment analysis dea has been traditionally used for assessing the performance of individual decision making units and therefore necessary extensions are needed to apply dea principles to the global organisational level without however losing its attractive features the method was originally developed as an aid to the reorganisation of the allocation of central funds to local authorities in greece

some models for estimating technical and scale inefficiencies in data envelopment analysis in management contexts mathematical programming is usually used to evaluate a collection of possible alternative courses of action en route to selecting one which is best in this capacity mathematical programming serves as a planning aid to management data envelopment analysis reverses this role and employs mathematical programming to obtain ex post facto evaluations of the relative efficiency of management accomplishments however they may have been planned or executed mathematical programming is thereby extended for use as a tool for control and evaluation of past accomplishments as well as a tool to aid in planning future activities the ccr ratio form introduced by charnes cooper and rhodes as part of their data envelopment analysis approach comprehends both technical and scale inefficiencies via the optimal value of the ratio form as obtained directly from the data without requiring a priori specification of weights and or explicit delineation of assumed functional forms of relations between inputs and outputs a separation into technical and scale efficiencies is accomplished by the methods developed in this paper without altering the latter conditions for use of dea directly on observational data technical inefficiencies are identified with failures to achieve best possible output levels and or usage of excessive amounts of inputs methods for identifying and correcting the magnitudes of these inefficiencies as supplied in prior work are illustrated in the present paper a new separate variable is introduced which makes it possible to determine whether operations were conducted in regions of increasing constant or decreasing returns to scale in multiple input and multiple output situations the results are discussed and related not only to classical single output economics but also to more modern versions of economics which are identified with contestable market theories

instruments randomization and learning about development there is currently much debate about the effectiveness of foreign aid and about what kind of projects can engender economic development there is skepticism about the ability of econometric analysis to resolve these issues or of development agencies to learn from their own experience in response there is increasing use in development economics of randomized controlled trials rcts to accumulate credible knowledge of what works without overreliance on questionable theory or statistical methods when rcts are not possible the proponents of these methods advocate quasirandomization through instrumental variable iv techniques or natural experiments i argue that many of these applications are unlikely to recover quantities that are useful for policy or understanding two key issues are the misunderstanding of exogeneity and the handling of heterogeneity i illustrate from the literature on aid and growth actual randomization faces similar problems as does quasi randomization notwithstanding rhetoric to the contrary i argue that experiments have no special ability to produce more credible knowledge than other methods and that actual experiments are frequently subject to practical problems that undermine any claims to statistical or epistemic superiority i illustrate using prominent experiments in development and elsewhere as with iv methods rct based evaluation of projects without guidance from an understanding of underlying mechanisms is unlikely to lead to scientific progress in the understanding of economic development i welcome recent trends in development experimentation away from the evaluation of projects and toward the evaluation of theoretical mechanisms jel c21 f35 o19

allocating the fixed cost as a complement of other cost inputs a dea approach in cost allocation problem traditional dea approaches allocate the fixed cost among a group of decision making units dmus and treat the allocated cost as an extra input of each dmu if costs except for the fixed cost are regarded as inputs in the cost allocation problem then it is obvious that the fixed cost is a complement of other inputs rather than an extra independent input therefore it is necessary to combine the allocated cost with other cost measures in cost allocation problem based on this observation this paper investigates the relationship between the allocated cost and the dea efficiency score and develops a dea based approach to allocate the fixed cost among various dmus an example of allocating advertising expenditure between a car manufacturer and its dealers is presented to illustrate the method proposed in this paper

local resource reallocation considering practical feasibility a centralized data envelopment analysis approach abstractmany studies have addressed resource allocation issues by using centralized data envelopment analysis models however few of them provided a local resource reallocation plan which may be carried out more easily this article proposes two models to get such plans the first one considers an acceptable percentage of changes in resources to ensure practical feasibility the second one further considers a situation where resources can only be allowed to shift within specific units the proposed models are applied to an empirical study based on a hospital system in taiwan to demonstrate the practical feasibility of the suggested plans we compare our reallocation suggestions to a plan that can make the whole system be perfectly efficient the main conclusion is that the plans derived from our models are more practically feasible than that with perfect efficiency

generating skilled self employment in developing countries experimental evidence from uganda we study a government program in uganda designed to help the poor and unemployed become self employed artisans increase incomes and thus promote social stability young adults in uganda s conflict affected north were invited to form groups and submit grant proposals for vocational training and business start up funding was randomly assigned among screened and eligible groups treatment groups received unsupervised grants of 382 per member grant recipients invest some in skills training but most in tools and materials after four years half practice a skilled trade relative to the control group the program increases business assets by 57 work hours by 17 and earnings by 38 many also formalize their enterprises and hire labor we see no effect however on social cohesion antisocial behavior or protest effects are similar by gender but are qualitatively different for women because they begin poorer meaning the impact is larger relative to their starting point and because women s work and earnings stagnate without the program but take off with it the patterns we observe are consistent with credit constraints

estimating the effects of a time limited earnings subsidy for welfare leavers in the self sufficiency project ssp welfare demonstration members of a randomly assigned treatment group could receive a subsidy for full time work the subsidy was available for 3 years but only to people who began working full time within 12 months of random assignment a simple optimizing model suggests that the eligibility rules created an establishment incentive to find a job and leave welfare within a year of random assignment and an entitlement incentive to choose work over welfare once eligibility was established building on this insight we develop an econometric model of welfare participation that allows us to separate the two effects and estimate the impact of the earnings subsidy on welfare entry and exit rates among those who achieved eligibility the combination of the two incentives explains the time profile of the experimental impacts which peaked 15 months after random assignment and faded relatively quickly our findings suggest that about half of the peak impact of ssp was attributable to the establishment incentive despite the extra work effort generated by ssp the program had no lasting impact on wages and little or no long run effect on welfare participation

sharp iv bounds on average treatment effects on the treated and other populations under endogeneity and noncompliance in the presence of an endogenous binary treatment and a valid binary instrument causal effects are point identified only for the subpopulation of compliers given that the treatment is monotone in the instrument with the exception of the entire population causal inference for further subpopulations has been widely ignored in econometrics we invoke treatment monotonicity and or dominance assumptions to derive sharp bounds on the average treatment effects on the treated as well as on other groups furthermore we use our methods to assess the educational impact of a school voucher program in colombia and discuss testable implications of our assumptions

efficient resource allocation via efficiency bootstraps an application to r d project budgeting resource allocation decisions are crucial for the success of an organization this paper proposes an integrated approach to resource allocation problems in which decision makers have one observation of the multiple input output criteria of candidates we offer important improvements over existing approaches based on the widely used data envelopment analysis dea which has two major limitations in its application to resource allocation first traditional dea models compute efficiency scores by optimizing firm specific shadow prices of inputs and outputs this could be problematic because in practice stakeholders would usually require unanimously agreed upon trade offs among evaluation criteria second previous allocation approaches based on dea do not allow for controlling the risk exposure of allocation portfolios to tackle these problems we propose an efficiency measure based on equilibrium shadow prices of different criteria and we use the bootstrap efficiency distributions to gather information regarding efficiency variations and correlations through our methodology decision makers can obtain the risk minimizing allocation portfolio we illustrate the proposed approach through an empirical r d project budgeting problem in which we allocate funding according to the projects efficiency distributions

a generalized equilibrium efficient frontier data envelopment analysis approach for evaluating dmus with fixed sum outputs the recently published equilibrium efficient frontier data envelopment analysis eefdea approach yang et al 2014 represents a step forward in evaluating decision making units dmus with fixed sum outputs when compared to prior approaches such as fsodea fixed sum outputs dea approach yang et al 2011 and zsg dea zero sum gains dea approach lins et al 2003 and so on based on the eefdea approach in this paper we proposed a generalized equilibrium efficient frontier data envelopment analysis approach geefdea which improves and strengthens the eefdea approach compared to eefdea approach this approach makes several improvements in evaluation namely that 1 it is not necessary to determine the evaluation order in advance which overcomes the limitation that different evaluation orders will lead to different results 2 the equilibrium efficient frontier can be achieved in only one step no matter how many dmus they are which greatly simplifies the procedure to reach the equilibrium efficient frontier especially when the number of dmus is large and 3 the constraint that signs of outputs adjustment of each dmu must be same all non positive or all non negative in prior approaches has been relaxed in this sense the result obtained by the proposed approach is more consistent with the demand of practical applications finally the proposed approach combined with assurance regions ar is applied to the data set of 2012 london olympic games

innovation strategies matter latin america s middle income trap meets china and globalisation productive transformation from commodity production to higher value added activities is at the heart of the transition from a middle income to a high income economy the key is the development of d

cost minimizing target setting heuristics for making inefficient decision making units efficient abstract a problem of increasing the efficiencies of inefficient decision making units dmus with known marginal costs of reducing inputs is considered it is shown that the problem is difficult to solve exactly and has exponential computational complexity two heuristics heuristic i and heuristic ii that consider cost minimizing dea frontier projections for inefficient dmus are proposed the proposed heuristics are tested by using several simulated and real world datasets with linear and fibonacci marginal input reduction costs the results of the proposed heuristics are compared with traditional cost insensitive dea frontier projections and it is shown that heuristic i results in approximately 18 58 lower costs

monotone instrumental variables with an application to the returns to schooling for fifty years econometric analyses of treatment response have made extensive use of instrumental variable iv assumptions holding that mean response is constant across specified subpopulations of a population of interest 2 yet the credibility of mean independence conditions and other iv assumptions has often been a matter of considerable disagreement with much debate about whether some covariate is or is not a valid instrument in an application of interest there is therefore good reason to consider weaker but more credible assumptions to this end we introduce monotone instlumental variable miv assumptions holding that mean response varies weakly monotonically across specified subpopulations we study the identifying power of these miv assumptions and give an empirical application the findings reported here add to the literature developing nonparametric bounds on treatment effects 3 this paper uses the same formal setup as manski 1997 there is a probability space j x2 p of individuals each member j of population j has observable covariates xi e x and a response function yj t y mapping the mutually exclusive and exhaustive treatments t e t into outcomes yj t e y person j has a realized treatment zj e t and a realized outcome y 1 y zi both of which are observable the latent outcomes yj t

misreported schooling and returns to education evidence from the uk this paper aims to provide a number of contributions of policy practical and methodological interest to the study of the returns to educational qualifications first we derive estimates of the returns to different qualifications for the uk that allow for the possibility of misreported attainment using data from the british national child development survey to date any major empirical evidence on the importance of this issue is restricted to the us where it was shown that errors might indeed play a non negligible role second we aim to provide the academic and policy community with estimates of the accuracy of commonly used types of data on educational attainment administrative files self reported information close to the date of completion of the qualification and recall information ten years after completion third by using the unique nature of our data we assess how the biases from measurement error and from omitted ability and family background variables interact in the estimation of returns we intend to produce simple calibration rules to allow policymakers to use nationally representative data such as the labour force survey that totally rely on self reported information on qualifications and contain little or no information on individual ability and family background we rely throughout on a unified framework of general applicability to study the impact of misreported treatment status on the estimation of causal treatment effects jel codes c10 i20 j31

partial identification of counterfactual choice probabilities this article shows how to predict counterfactual discrete choice behavior when the presumed behavioral model partially identifies choice probabilities the simple general approach uses observable choice probabilities to partially infer the distribution of types in the population and then applies the results to predict behavior in unrealized choice settings two illustrative applications are given one assumes only that persons have strict preferences the other assumes strict preferences and utility functions that are linear in attribute bundles with no restrictions on the shape of the distribution of preference parameters

evaluating education programs that have lotteried admission and selective attrition we study the effectiveness of magnet programs in an urban district that ration excess demand by admission lotteries differential attrition arises since students who lose the lottery are more likely to pursue options outside the school district than students who win the lottery when students leave the district important outcome variables are often not observed the treatment effects are not point identified we exploit known quantiles of the outcome distribution to construct informative bounds on treatment effects we find that magnet programs improve behavioral outcomes but have no significant effect on achievement

anonymity or distance job search and labour market exclusion in a growing african city we show that helping young job seekers signal their skills to employers generates large and persistent improvements in their labour market outcomes we do this by comparing an intervention that improves the ability to signal skills the job application workshop to a transport subsidy treatment designed to reduce the cost of job search in the short run both interventions have large positive effects on the probability of finding a formal job the workshop also increases the probability of having a stable job with an open ended contract four years later the workshop significantly increases earnings job satisfaction and employment duration but the effects of the transport subsidy have dissipated gains are concentrated on individuals who generally have worse labour market outcomes overall our findings highlight that young people possess valuable skills that are unobservable to employers making these skills observable generates earnings gains that are far greater than the cost of the intervention

information mobile telephony and traders search behavior in niger information and communications technologies have spread rapidly in developing countries we investigate the impact of mobile phones on traders search behavior in niger by constructing a theoretical model of search in which traders engage in sequential search for the optimal sales price using a trader panel dataset spanning 2005 2007 we find empirical support for the model in that the duration of mobile phone coverage is associated with increased search activity this effect evolves dynamically over time and is stronger for larger traders who engage in arbitrage over longer distances results provide empirical evidence for the observed linkages between mobile telephony and price dispersion

set identification in models with multiple equilibria we propose a computationally feasible way of deriving the identified features of models with multiple equilibria in pure or mixed strategies it is shown that in the case of shapley regular normal form games the identified set is characterized by the inclusion of the true data distribution within the core of a choquet capacity which is interpreted as the generalized likelihood of the model in turn this inclusion is characterized by a finite set of inequalities and efficient and easily implementable combinatorial methods are described to check them in all normal form games the identified set is characterized in terms of the value of a submodular or convex optimization program efficient algorithms are then given and compared to check inclusion of a parameter in this identified set the latter are illustrated with family bargaining games and oligopoly entry games copyright 2011 oxford university press

efficient allocation of co2 emissions in china a zero sum gains data envelopment model abstract the appropriate allocation of co 2 emission quotas can build up a solid foundation for future emissions trading building co 2 emissions allocation mechanism has significant practical implications based on radial zero sum gains data envelopment zsg dea allocation model this paper uses a non radial zsg dea model to allocate co 2 emissions between different chinese provinces unlike previous studies treating co 2 as the input variable we treat co 2 as the undesirable output variable the modified model can better reflect macro production process while earlier relevant models treated co 2 emissions as inputs this paper contributes to the existing resource allocation method and allocates china s provincial co 2 emissions from the view of technical efficiency the results of our paper reveal that 1 between 2006 and 2010 the cumulative optimal amounts of co 2 emissions were higher than the actual amounts in 12 provinces and lower in other 18 provinces 2 several energy abundant provinces such as shanxi and inter mongolia need to take more responsibilities in co 2 emissions reduction 3 after the zsg dea allocation all provinces co 2 emissions are on zsg dea frontier which reflects the overall pareto optimality

treatment effect heterogeneity in theory and practice instrumental variables iv methods identify internally valid causal effects for individuals whose treatment status is manipulable by the instrument at hand inference for other populations requires homogeneity assumptions this paper outlines a theoretical framework that nests causal homogeneity assumptions these ideas are illustrated using sibling sex composition to estimate the effect of childbearing on economic and marital outcomes the application is motivated by american welfare reform the empirical results generally support the notion of reduced labour supply and increased poverty as a consequence of childbearing but evidence on the impact of childbearing on marital stability and welfare use is more tenuous

training wages and sample selection estimating sharp bounds on treatment effects this paper empirically assesses the wage effects of the job corps program one of the largest federally funded job training programs in the u s even with the aid of a randomized experiment the impact of a training program on wages is difficult to study because of sample selection a pervasive problem in applied microeconometric research wage rates are only observed for those who are employed and employment status itself may be affected by the training program this paper develops an intuitive trimming procedure for bounding average treatment effects in the presence of sample selection in contrast to existing methods the procedure requires neither exclusion restrictions nor a bounded support for the outcome of interest identification results estimators and their asymptotic distribution are presented the bounds suggest that the program raised wages consistent with the notion that the job corps raises earnings by increasing human capital rather than solely through encouraging work the estimator is generally applicable to typical treatment evaluation problems in which there is nonrandom sample selection attrition copyright wiley blackwell

the 2009 lawrence r klein lecture diversified treatment under ambiguity this article develops a broad theme about treatment under ambiguity through study of a particular decision criterion the broad theme is that a planner may want to cope with ambiguity by diversification assigning observationally identical persons to different treatments study of the minimax regret mr criterion substantiates the theme the article significantly extends my earlier analysis of one period planning with an individualistic treatment and a linear welfare function i show that mr treatment allocations are fractional in a large class of planning problems with nonlinear welfare functions interacting treatments learning and noncooperative aspects

the interpretation of instrumental variables estimators in simultaneous equations models with an application to the demand for fish in markets where prices are determined by the intersection of supply and demand curves standard identification results require the presence of instruments that shift one curve but not the other these results are typically presented in the context of linear models with fixed coefficients and additive residuals the first contribution of this paper is an investigation of the consequences of relaxing both the linearity and the additivity assumption for the interpretation of linear instrumental variables estimators without these assumptions the standard linear instrumental variables estimator identifies a weighted average of the derivative of the behavioural relationship of interest a second contribution is the formulation of critical identifying assumptions in terms of demand and supply at different prices and instruments rather than in terms of functional form specific residuals our approach to the simultaneous equations problem and the average derivative interpretation of instrumental variables estimates is illustrated by estimating the demand for fresh whiting at the fulton fish market strong and credible instruments for identification of this demand function are available in the form of weather conditions at sea

recent two stage sample selection procedures with an application to the gender wage gap recently developed two stage estimation methods of sample selection models are used in the context of data from the 1989 labor market activity survey to examine labor supply decisions and wage outcomes for employed men and women recent hypothesis test procedures are used to test for no sample selection and to test for a parametric against a semiparametric selection correction procedure we conclude that selection is indeed an issue for the sample at hand and that the semiparametric specification is appropriate we also present the standard decomposition of the gender wage gap into its explained and unexplained portions

the renewed developmental state the national development bank and the brazil model this study examines how brazil operationalised a renewed developmentalist project during the democratic period and especially during the presidency of lula da silva we use an original data set of 2 115 loans made by the brazilian national development bank bndes between 2002 and 2011 to show elements of both change and continuity with brazil s developmentalist past large loans continued to flow to many of brazil s historic large firms and industrial sectors as reported widely but the data also show significant numbers of smaller loans to firms in all sectors as well as renewed support for internationalisation and innovation we conclude that bndes s lending reflects less a wholly new model of developmentalism than it does a developmentalist strategy that has been renewed and updated for the challenges and opportunities of a more market oriented economy

mobile phone coverage and producer markets evidence from west africa mobile phone coverage has expanded considerably throughout the developing world particularly within sub saharan africa existing evidence suggests that increased access to information technology has improved agricultural market efficiency for consumer markets and certain commodities but there is less evidence of its impact on producer markets building on the work of aker 2010 this paper estimates the impact of mobile phone coverage on producer price dispersion for three commodities in niger the results suggest that mobile phone coverage reduces spatial producer price dispersion by 6 percent for cowpea a semi perishable commodity these effects are strongest for remote markets and during certain periods of the year the introduction of mobile phone coverage has no effect on producer price dispersion for millet and sorghum two staple grains that are less perishable and are commonly stored by farmers there are no impacts of mobile phone coverage on traders gross margins or producer price levels but mobile phone coverage is associated with a reduction in the intra annual price variation for cowpea these results are potentially explained by the fact that farmers engage in greater storage for storable commodities such as millet and sorghum

adult outcomes for children of teenage mothers using data from the british household panel survey this study examines the relationship between several outcomes in early adulthood e g education inactivity earnings and health and being born to a teenage mother besides standard cross sectional multivariate regression estimates we also present evidence from non parametric estimates and from estimates that account for unmeasured family background heterogeneity by comparing siblings born to the same mother who timed their births at different ages regardless of the econometric technique being born to a teenage mother is usually associated with worse outcomes an important channel of transmission of this adverse effect is childhood family structure which plays a more powerful role than childhood family poverty albeit smaller some of the detrimental effects are also found for children of mothers who gave birth in their early 20s

identification and asymptotic approximations three examples of progress in econometric theory in empirical economics the size and quality of datasets and computational power has grown substantially along with the size and complexity of the econometric models and the population parameters of interest with more and better data it is natural to expect to be able to answer more subtle questions about population relationships and to pay more attention to the consequences of misspecification of the model for the empirical conclusions much of the recent work in econometrics has emphasized two themes the first is the fragility of statistical identification the other related theme involves the way economists make large sample approximations to the distributions of estimators and test statistics i will discuss how these issues of identification and alternative asymptotic approximations have been studied in three research areas analysis of linear endogenous regressor models with many and or weak instruments nonparametric models with endogenous regressors and estimation of partially identified parameters these areas offer good examples of the progress that has been made in econometrics

the rand health insurance experiment three decades later we re present and re examine the analysis from the famous rand health insurance experiment from the 1970s on the impact of consumer cost sharing in health insurance on medical spending we begin by summarizing the experiment and its core findings in a manner that would be standard in the current age we then examine potential threats to the validity of a causal interpretation of the experimental treatment effects stemming from different study participation and differential reporting of outcomes across treatment arms finally we re consider the famous rand estimate that the elasticity of medical spending with respect to its out of pocket price is 0 2 emphasizing the challenges associated with summarizing the experimental treatment effects from non linear health insurance contracts using a single price elasticity

optimal food price stabilization in a small open developing country in poor countries most governments implement policies aiming to stabilize the prices of staple foods which often include storage and trade measures insulating their domestic market from the world market it is of crucial importance to understand the precise motivations and efficiency of those interventions because they can have consequences worldwide this paper addresses those issues by analyzing the case of a small open developing country confronted by shocks to both the crop yield and foreign price in this model government interventions may be justified by the lack of an insurance market for food prices considering this market imperfection the authors design optimal public interventions through trade and storage policies they show that an optimal trade policy largely consists of subsidizing imports and taxing exports which benefits consumers at the expense of producers import subsidies alleviate the non negativity of food storage in other words when stocks are exhausted subsidizing imports prevents domestic price spikes one striking result an optimal storage policy on its own is detrimental to consumers since its stabilizing benefits leak into the world market and it raises the average domestic price by contrast an optimal combination of storage and trade policies results in a powerful stabilizing effect for domestic food prices

innovation systems and technological specialization in latin america and the caribbean abstract this paper examines the national systems of innovation nsi of latin american and caribbean lac countries and attempts to assess their performances although it points out at a number of specific successes overall the region s nsi have evolved since their inception in the 1950s into weak entities science and technology institutions and organisations are not fully performing an enabling role links and interactions between government support organisations businesses and academia are tenuous investment in intangibles and human capital is low and public policy is only partially effective the main result of such weakness is that lac countries innovative performance has as measured by the index of the technological specialisation its which relates the world s normalised shares of high to low tech exports with the only exception perhaps of mexico remained stagnant or has fallen and has lost relatively to many countries that started at similar levels twenty years ago

regional allocation of co2 emissions allowance over provinces in china by 2020 the mitigation efforts of china are increasingly important for meeting global climate target since the rapid economic growth of china has led to an increasing share in the world s total co2 emissions this paper sets out to explore the approach for realizing china s national mitigation targets submitted to the unfccc as part of the copenhagen accord that is to reduce the intensity of co2 emissions per unit of gdp by 40 45 by 2020 as well as reducing the energy intensity and increasing the share of non fossil fuel consumption through regional allocation of emission allowance over china s provinces since the realization of china s mitigation target essentially represents a total amount emission allowance allocation problem an improved zero sum gains data envelopment analysis optimization model which could deal with the constant total amount resources allocation is proposed in this study by utilizing this model and based on several scenarios of china s economic growth co2 emissions and energy consumption a new efficient emission allowance allocation scheme on provincial level for china by 2020 is proposed the allocation results indicate that different provinces have to shoulder different mitigation burdens in terms of emission intensity reduction energy intensity reduction and share of non fossil fuels increase

drought of opportunities contemporaneous and long term impacts of rainfall shocks on human capital higher wages are generally thought to increase human capital production particularly in the developing world we introduce a simple model of human capital production in which investments and time allocation differ by age using data on test scores and schooling from rural india we show that higher wages increase human capital investment in early life in utero to age 2 but decrease human capital from age 5 to 16 children switch out of school into productive work when rainfall is higher the opportunity cost of schooling even for fairly young children is an important factor in determining overall human capital investment

does compulsory school attendance affect schooling and earnings we establish that season of birth is related to educational attainment because of school start age policy and compulsory school attendance laws individuals born in the beginning of the year start school at an older age and can therefore drop out after completing less schooling than individuals born near the end of the year roughly 25 percent of potential dropouts remain in school because of compulsory schooling laws we estimate the impact of compulsory schooling on earnings by using quarter of birth as an instrument for education the instrumental variables estimate of the return to education is close to the ordinary least squares estimate suggesting that there is little bias in conventional estimates every developed country in the world has a compulsory schooling requirement yet little is known about the effect these laws have on educational attainment and earnings 1 this paper exploits an unusual natural experiment to estimate the impact of compulsory schooling laws in the united states the experiment stems from the fact that children born in different months of the year start school at different ages while compulsory schooling laws generally require students to remain in school until their sixteenth or seventeenth birthday in effect the interaction of school entry requirements and compulsory schooling laws compel students born

sensitivity to exogeneity assumptions in program evaluation in many empirical studies of the effect of social programs researchers assume that conditional on a set of observed covariates assignment to the treatment is exogenous or unconfounded aka selection on observables often this assumption is not realistic and researchers are concerned about the robustness of their results to departures from it one approach e g charles manski 1990 is to entirely drop the exogeneity assumption and investigate what can be learned about treatment effects without it with unbounded outcomes and in the absence of alternative identifying assumptions there are no restrictions on the set of possible values for average treatment effects this does not mean however that all evaluations are equally sensitive to departures from the exogeneity assumption in this paper i explore an alternative approach developed by paul rosenbaum and donald rubin 1983 where the assumption of exogeneity is explicitly relaxed by allowing for a limited amount of correlation between treatment and unobserved components of the outcomes the starting point of the sensitivity analysis is the assumption that the exogeneity assumption is satisfied only conditional on an additional unobserved covariate making assumptions about the effect of the unobserved covariate on the outcome and its correlation with the treatment i trace out the set of possible values for the treatment effect of interest by considering a sufficiently large set of possible correlations with outcomes and treatment one can recover the bounds on the treatment effect derived by manski 1990 the approach here in the spirit of rosenbaum and rubin 1983 and rosenbaum 1995 is to allow only a limited amount of correlation and to judge the sensitivity of average treatment effect estimates to such correlations there are two novel features of the proposed analysis first rather than formulate the sensitivity in terms of coefficients on the unobserved covariate the sensitivity results are presented in terms of partial r values which may be easier to interpret second the partial r values of the unobserved covariates are compared to those for the observed covariates in order to facilitate judgments regarding the plausibility of values necessary to substantially change results obtained under exogeneity the proposed sensitivity analysis is conceptually related to the practice of assessing sensitivity of estimates by comparisons with results obtained by discarding one or more observed covariates james heckman and v joseph hotz 1989 rajeev dehejia and sadek wahba 1999 jeffrey smith and petra todd 2001 the attraction of the sensitivity analysis is that it is more directly relevant one is not interested in what would have happened in the absence of covariates actually observed but in biases that are the result from not observing all relevant covariates

efficiency of a fixed but allocatable input a non parametric approach the traditional non parametric or dea models measure efficiency for given inputs and outputs without allowing for reallocation of inputs these models do not look inside the technology but rather treat it as a black box in this paper we open up the box by modeling the possibility of reallocation of a fixed input

fixed cost and resource allocation based on dea cross efficiency abstract in many managerial applications situations frequently occur when a fixed cost is used in constructing the common platform of an organization and needs to be shared by all related entities or decision making units dmus it is of vital importance to allocate such a cost across dmus where there is competition for resources data envelopment analysis dea has been successfully used in cost and resource allocation problems whether it is a cost or resource allocation issue one needs to consider both the competitive and cooperative situation existing among dmus in addition to maintaining or improving efficiency the current paper uses the cross efficiency concept in dea to approach cost and resource allocation problems because dea cross efficiency uses the concept of peer appraisal it is a very reasonable and appropriate mechanism for allocating a shared resource cost it is shown that our proposed iterative approach is always feasible and ensures that all dmus become efficient after the fixed cost is allocated as an additional input measure the cross efficiency dea based iterative method is further extended into a resource allocation setting to achieve maximization in the aggregated output change by distributing available resources such allocations for fixed costs and resources are more acceptable to the players involved because the allocation results are jointly determined by all dmus rather than a specific one the proposed approaches are demonstrated using an existing data set that has been applied in similar studies

characterizing an equitable allocation of shared costs a dea approach abstract in many applications to which dea could be applied there is often a fixed or common cost which is imposed on all decision making units this would be the case for example for branches of a bank which can be accessed via the numerous automatic teller machines scattered throughout the country a problem arises as to how this cost can be assigned in an equitable way to the various dmus in this paper we propose a dea approach to obtain this cost allocation which is based on two principles invariance and pareto minimality it is shown that the proposed method is a natural extension of the simple one dimensional problem to the general multiple input multiple output case

china s regional natural resource allocation and utilization a dea based approach in a big data environment abstract china s economic reform and opening policy has resulted in china s rapid growth especially in terms of economy the growth however is mainly based on huge consumption of natural resources and that consumption should be reduced by significant amounts to protect global ecosystems emerged in 1980s big data has developed very quickly in recent years bringing new perspectives and opportunities for all kinds of academic fields especially in dea since it is a research highly based on data in this paper we propose a sbm dea model based on natural resource input orientation to evaluate the efficiency of natural resource utilization for 26 provincial regions in mainland china from 2005 to 2012 a dea based approach is developed to allocate a reduced total of natural resources among the 26 provincial regions drawing support from the developments of big data we use each provincial region s previously observed production data to characterize its own production technology which allows a better analysis of how the production will change after allocations of natural resources are reduced our empirical study shows that most provincial regions perform well in terms of efficiency in utilizing natural resources but that is based on huge consumption of natural resources from an area perspective the eastern area of china achieved the highest average efficiency value followed by the central and western areas our study also indicates that the most effective allocation of the natural resources requires about half of the 26 provincial regions to reduce their natural resource consumption while the remaining ones can maintain their original consumption

research needs and challenges in the few system coupling economic models with agronomic hydrologic and bioenergy models for sustainable food energy and water systems on october 12 13 a workshop funded by the national science foundation was held at iowa state university in ames iowa with a goal of identifying research needs related to coupled economic and biophysical models within the few system approximately 80 people attended the workshop with about half representing the social sciences primarily economics and the rest from the physical and natural sciences the focus and attendees were chosen so that findings would be particularly relevant to sbe research needs while taking into account the critical connectivity needed between social sciences and other disciplines we have identified several major gaps in existing scientific knowledge that present substantial impediments to understanding the few system we especially recommend research in these areas as a priority for future funding 1 economic models of decision making in coupled systems deliberate human activity has been the dominant factor driving environmental and land use changes for hundreds of years while economists have made great strides in modeling and understanding these choices the coupled systems modeling literature with some important exceptions has not reflected these contributions several paths forward seem fruitful first baseline economic models that assume rationality can be used much more widely than they are currently moreover the current generation of iams that include rational agents have emphasized partial equilibrium studies appropriate for smaller systems to allow this approach to be used to study larger systems the potential for and consequences of general equilibrium effects should be studied as well second it is important to address shortcomings in these models of economic decision making valuable improvements could be gained from developing coupled models that draw insights from behavioral economics many decision makers deviate systematically from actions that would be predicted by strict rationality but very few iams incorporate this behavior potentially leading to inaccurate predictions about the effects of policies and regulations improved models of human adaptation and induced technological change can also be incorporated into coupled models particularly for medium to long run models decisions about adaptation and technological change will have substantial effects on the conclusions and policy implications but more compelling methods for incorporating these changes into modeling are sorely needed in addition some economic decisions are intrinsically dynamic yet few coupled models explicitly incorporate dynamic models economic models that address uncertainty in decision making are also underutilized in coupled models of the few system 2 coupling models across disciplines despite much recent progress established models for one component of the few system often cannot currently produce outcomes that can be used as inputs for models of other components this misalignment makes integrated modeling difficult and is especially apparent in linking models of natural phenomena with models of economic decision making economic agents typically act to maximize a form of utility or welfare that is not directly linked to physical processes and they typically require probabilistic forecasts as an input to their decision making that many models in the natural sciences cannot directly produce we believe that an especially promising approach is the development of bridge models that convert outputs from one model into inputs for another such models can be viewed as application specific reduced form distillations of a richer and more realistic underlying model ideally these bridge models would be developed in collaborative research projects involving economists statisticians and disciplinary specialists and would contribute to improved understanding in the scientific discipline as well 3 model validation and comparison there is little clarity on how models should be evaluated and compared to each other both within individual disciplines and as components of larger iams this challenge makes larger integrated modeling exercises extremely difficult some potential ways to advance are by developing statistical criteria that measure model performance along the dimensions suitable for inclusion in an iam as well as infrastructure and procedures to facilitate model comparisons focusing on the models out of sample distributional forecasting performance as well as that of the iam overall is especially promising and of particular importance moreover applications of iams tend to estimate the effect of hypothetical future policy actions but there have been very few studies that have used these models to estimate the effect of past policy actions these exercises should be encouraged they offer a well understood test bed for the iams and also contribute to fundamental scientific knowledge through better understanding of the episode in question the retrospective nature of this form of analysis also presents the opportunity to combine reduced form estimation strategies with the iams as an additional method of validation

allocating fixed costs and resources via data envelopment analysis abstract in this paper we show that data envelopment analysis dea can be viewed as maximising the average efficiency of the decision making units dmus in an organisation building upon this we present dea based models for a allocating fixed costs to dmus and b allocating input resources to dmus simultaneous to allocating input resources output targets are also decided for each dmu numeric results are presented for a number of example problems taken from the literature

the adjusted spherical frontier model with weight restrictions abstract this paper presents the asfm lp model a parametric data envelopment analysis dea model for allocating resources commonly called inputs this model considers that a fair allocation of inputs is one that maximizes the dea ccr efficiencies of the decision making units dmus the main assumption of the asfm lp is the predefined spherical shape of the efficiency frontier we have demonstrated that our method extends the existing parametric model asfm to allow the introduction of weight restrictions which has great importance in practical applications of dea numeric examples are presented to show the application of the method

allocation of carbon dioxide emission permits with the minimum cost for chinese provinces in big data environment abstract the environmental problem and global warming have drawn many governments attention in order to solve the problem reasonable allocation of carbon dioxide emission cde permits is an important issue because it sets the targets for the decision making units to control the amount of carbon dioxide emission in this paper a new data envelopment analysis approach is proposed to evaluate the efficiency of decision making units in a big data environment and set the carbon dioxide emission permits for each decision making unit with the minimum costs comparing with the previous works on carbon dioxide emission permits allocation we firstly allocate the amount of carbon dioxide emission permits taking account into the cost each decision making unit should take to achieve its target moreover two kinds of linear programming problems are developed under efficiency invariance principle and efficiency changeability principle respectively as the allocation of carbon dioxide emission permits causes the minimum cost the decision making units are more easily to accept the allocation alternative finally our approach is applied to the carbon dioxide emission permits allocation among chinese provinces the results show that the approach can well allocate the cde permits with the minimum cost and also reveal the relationship between the marginal cost of reducing cde permits and the adjustment on them

changes in the distribution of male and female wages accounting for employment composition using bounds this paper examines changes in the distribution of wages using bounds to allow for the impact of nonrandom selection into work we show that worst case bounds can be informative however because employment rates in the united kingdom are often low they are not informative about changes in educational or gender wage differentials thus we explore ways to tighten these bounds using restrictions motivated from economic theory with these assumptions we find convincing evidence of an increase in inequality within education groups changes in educational differentials and increases in the relative wages of women

structural reforms and technological behaviour abstract the opening up to foreign competition the deregulation of a vast array of markets and the privatization of public sector firms have been inducing major changes in the structure and behaviour of the latin american economies the aim of this paper is to describe some of these changes and to identify the new patterns of firm behavior the new institutional environment and the new policy agenda gradually emerging in the region in the field of science and technology as a result of recent trade liberalization and market deregulation efforts

treatment effects with unobserved heterogeneity a set identification approach we propose the sharp identifiable bounds of the potential outcome distributions using panel data we allow for the possibility that statistical randomization of treatment assignments is not achieved until unobserved heterogeneity is properly controlled for we use certain stationarity assumptions to obtain the sharp bounds our approach allows for dynamic treatment decisions where the current treatment decisions may depend on the past treatments or the past observed outcomes as an empirical illustration we study the effect of smoking during pregnancy on infant birthweight we find that for the group of switchers the infant birthweight of a smoking mother is first order stochastically dominated by that of a nonsmoking mother

multi output efficiency with good and bad outputs abstract cherchye de rock dierynck roodhooft and sabbe 2013 introduced a dea methodology that is specially tailored for multi output efficiency measurement the methodology accounts for jointly used inputs and incorporates information on how inputs are allocated to outputs in this paper we present extensions that render the methodology useful to deal with undesirable or bad outputs in addition to desirable or good outputs interestingly these extensions deal in a natural way with several limitations of existing dea approaches to treat undesirable outputs we also demonstrate the practical usefulness of our methodological extensions through an application to us electric utilities

better late than nothing some comments on deaton 2009 and heckman and urzua 2009 two recent papers deaton 2009 and heckman and urzua 2009 argue against what they see as an excessive and inappropriate use of experimental and quasi experimental methods in empirical work in economics in the last decade they specifically question the increased use of instrumental variables and natural experiments in labor economics and of randomized experiments in development economics in these comments i will make the case that this move towards shoring up the internal validity of estimates and towards clarifying the description of the population these estimates are relevant for has been important and beneficial in increasing the credibility of empirical work in economics i also address some other concerns raised by the deaton and heckman urzua papers

housing mobility programs and economic self sufficiency evidence from a randomized experiment this paper examines the effects of a randomized housing voucher program on individual economic outcomes public housing residents who are offered relocation counseling together with housing vouchers that can only be redeemed in low poverty areas experience a reduction in welfare receipt of between 11 and 16 compared to controls these effects are not accompanied by changes in earnings or employment rates as measured by unemployment insurance records offering families unrestricted housing vouchers without additional counseling appears to have little effect on economic outcomes

bounding causal effects using data from a contaminated natural experiment analysing the effects of teenage childbearing in this paper we consider what can be learned about causal effects when one uses a contaminated instrumental variable in particular we consider what inferences can be made about the causal effect of teenage childbearing on a teen mother s subsequent outcomes when we use the natural experiment of miscarriages to form an instrumental variable for teen births miscarriages might not meet all of the conditions required for an instrumental variable to identify such causal effects for all of the observations in our sample however it is an appropriate instrumental variable for some women namely those pregnant women who experience a random miscarriage although information from typical data sources does not allow one to identify these women we show that one can adapt results from horowitz and manski 1995 on identification with data from contaminated samples to construct informative bounds on the causal effect of teenage childbearing we use these bounds to re examine the effects of early chilbearing on the teen mother s subsequent educational and labour market attainment as considered in hotz mcelroy and sanders 1995a 1995b consistent with their study these bounds indicate that women who have births as teens have higher labour market earnings and hours worked compared to what they would have attained if their childbearing had been delayed

market structure and multiple equilibria in airline markets we provide a practical method to estimate the payoff functions of players in complete information static discrete games with respect to the empirical literature on entry games originated by bresnahan and reiss 1990 and berry 1992 the main novelty of our framework is to allow for general forms of heterogeneity across players without making equilibrium selection assumptions we allow the effects that the entry of each individual airline has on the profits of its competitors its competitive effects to differ across airlines the identified features of the model are sets of parameters partial identification such that the choice probabilities predicted by the econometric model are consistent with the empirical choice probabilities estimated from the data we apply this methodology to investigate the empirical importance of firm heterogeneity as a determinant of market structure in the u s airline industry we find evidence of heterogeneity across airlines in their profit functions the competitive effects of large airlines american delta united are different from those of low cost carriers and southwest also the competitive effect of an airline is increasing in its airport presence which is an important measure of observable heterogeneity in the airline industry then we develop a policy experiment to estimate the effect of repealing the wright amendment on competition in markets out of the dallas airports we find that repealing thewright amendment would increase the number of markets served out of dallas love

estimating the effect of financial aid offers on college enrollment a regression discontinuity approach an important problem faced by colleges and universities that of evaluating the effect of their financial aid offers on student enrollment decisions is complicated by the likely endogeneity of the aid offer variable in a student enrollment equation this article shows how discontinuities in an east coast college s aid assignment rule can be exploited to obtain credible estimates of the aid effect without having to rely on arbitrary exclusion restrictions and functional form assumptions semiparametric estimates based on a regression discontinuity rd approach affirm the importance of financial aid as an effective instrument in competing with other colleges for students

nonparametric continuous discrete choice models modeling choices that are both discrete and continuous is important in several settings the purpose of this article is to explore formulation and identification of such models when indirect utility functions are specified nonparametrically here we consider general nonseparable disturbances we give identification results for nonseparable sample selection models and use these to analyze identification of discrete continuous choice models

restricted reallocation of resources abstract this paper investigates restricted reallocation among individual units when the efficiency index is calculated for an aggregated unit in the dea framework moreover we address the question of the optimal reallocation flow the optimal flow of inputs among the individual units subject to given transfer costs restrictions on reallocation can be given by the maximum cost the managers are willing to pay in the framework of full reallocation there is a trade off between the maximum allowed reallocation cost and the highest efficiency the aggregated unit can achieve the final goal is to present a way to generate efficiency gain functions that show this trade off

efficiency and allocation of emission allowances and energy consumption over more sustainable european economies abstract efficient use of energy reduction in fossil fuel dependence and control of co2 emissions are all fundamental to development of a sustainable economy competitiveness in energy use saves imports of oil and gas increases gross domestic product and creates new jobs in the renewable energy and energy efficiency sectors this study identifies the more or less competitive european union member states in terms of sustainable growth using data envelopment analysis dea model and proposes new allocations of country greenhouse gas limits and energy consumption using a zero sum gains dea model the analysis of european countries fills a gap in the existing literature and contributes to the discussion on the 2020 2030 european strategy proposing an efficiency based indicator which measures country performance in terms of economic social and environmental factors gdp represents the economic factor population represents the social factor and emissions final and renewable energy consumption are the environmental factors the numerical results show that the initial allocations are inefficient applying the modelled reallocation the most efficient countries are rewarded by potential increases in emission and energy consumption while the least efficient countries must bring about decreases to achieve full efficiency

vouchers for private schooling in colombia evidence from a randomized natural experiment colombia used lotteries to distribute vouchers which partially covered the cost of private secondary school for students who maintained satisfactory academic progress three years after the lotteries winners were about 10 percentage points more likely to have finished 8th grade primarily because they were less likely to repeat grades and scored 0 2 standard deviations higher on achievement tests there is some evidence that winners worked less than losers and were less likely to marry or cohabit as teenagers benefits to participants likely exceeded the 24 per winner additional cost to the government of supplying vouchers instead of public school places

treatment effect bounds under monotonicity assumptions an application to swan ganz catheterization in section i we describe each of the resulting bounds when there are no other exogenous covariates that directly affect the outcome we show that if the effect of the treatment is positive and the assumptions of sv hold then the bounds of sv coincide with those of mp that assume a priori that the effect of the treatment is positive if the effect of the treatment is instead negative and the assumptions of sv hold then the bounds of sv coincide with those of mp that assume a priori that the effect of the treatment is negative hence the trade off between the analyses of sv treatment effect bounds under monotonicity assumptions an application to swan ganz catheterization

nonparametric bounds on treatment effects assume that each member of a population is characterized by values for the variables ya yb z x here x is a vector describing a person and z is a binary variable indicating which of two treatments this person receives the treatments are labelled a and b the variables ya and yb are scalar measures of the outcomes of the two treatments for example a cancer patient might be treated by a drug therapy or b surgery the relevant outcome y might be life span following treatment an unemployed worker might be given a vocational training or b job search assistance here the relevant outcome might be labor force status following treatment assume that a random sample is drawn and that one observes the realizations of z x and of the outcome under the treatment received thus ya is observed if treatment a is received but is a latent variable if treatment b is received similarly yb is either observed or latent suppose that one wants to learn the difference in expected outcome if all persons with attributes x were assigned to treatment a or b this treatment effect is

substitution and dropout bias in social experiments a study of an influential social experiment this paper considers the interpretation of evidence from social experiments when persons randomized out of a program being evaluated have good substitutes for it and when persons randomized into a program drop out to pursue better alternatives using data from an experimental evaluation of a classroom training program we document the empirical importance of control group substitution and treatment group dropping out evidence that one program is ineffective relative to close substitutes is not evidence that the type of service provided by all of the programs is ineffective although that is the way experimental evidence is often interpreted

what do instrumental variable models deliver with discrete dependent variables we study models with discrete endogenous variables and compare the use of two stage least squares 2sls in a linear probability model with bounds analysis using a nonparametric instrumental variable model 2sls has the advantage of providing an easy to compute point estimator of a slope coefficient which can be interpreted as a local average treatment effect late however the 2sls estimator does not measure the value of other useful treatment effect parameters without invoking untenable restrictions the nonparametric instrumental variable iv model has the advantage of being weakly restrictive so more generally applicable but it usually delivers set identification nonetheless it can be used to consistently estimate bounds on many parameters of interest including for example average treatment effects we illustrate using data from angrist evans 1998 and study the effect of family size on female employment

monopsony power in migrant labor markets evidence from the united arab emirates by exploiting a reform in the united arab emirates that relaxed restrictions on employer transitions we provide new estimates of the monopsony power of firms over migrant workers our results show that the reform increased incumbent migrants earnings and firm retention this occurs despite an increase in employer transitions and is driven by a fall in country exits while the outcomes of incumbents improved the reform decreased demand for new migrants and lowered their earnings these results are consistent with a model of monopsony in which firms face upward sloping labor supply curves for both new recruits in source countries and incumbent migrants

a more scientific allocation scheme of carbon dioxide emissions allowances the case from china abstract efficient allocation of carbon dioxide co2 emissions allowances is essential to the realization of the emissions reduction goal using china as an example this study applies a zero sum gains data envelopment analysis zsg dea model to translate the country s reduction target into provincial goals based on the chinese government s 2020 reduction goal to evaluate efficiency scores we employ the epsilon based measure model that combines radial and non radial characteristics different from prior studies we emphasize the effect of industrial structure on co2 emissions and calculate a composite gross domestic product gdp index as one of the output variables by utilizing the zsg dea model and based on china s provincial co2 emissions allowances as the input variable the composite gdp index and the population as the output variable we obtain an optimal reallocation scheme after four iterations a comparison between the results and official reduction goals shows that the government should increase co2 emissions allowances appropriately for most provinces with high proportions more than 40 of second industry increment in gdp thereby carrying implications for policymakers with china as an example these findings have global implications as regards developing a more scientific allocation scheme especially for regions with unbalanced industrial structures