Microdata from the UK Survey of Mortgage Lenders is used to model borrowers' choices between variable and fixed rate mortgages. The data is treated as a large-scale " natural experiment " on risky choice, with the choice of a fixed rate corresponding to the " safe choice " in a more conventional experimental setting. The choice is assumed to depend partly on risk attitude, and partly on expecta...

This paper examines whether financial assistance provided by government induces firms to spend more of their own funds on training expenditures, using plant level data for the Republic of Ireland. We pay particular attention to the potential problems in such an evaluation study, namely selectivity and endogeneity, by first identifying a valid counterfactual for grant receiving plants via a matc...

There is a great interest in Britain in the extent to which there exist a ‘low pay/no pay cycle’. That is, to what extent are individuals who are currently low paid more likely to become unemployed than high paid individuals, and are those who are currently unemployed more likely to become low paid rather then high paid when they get a job? To address these and related questions, we model annua...

We use original 2005 household survey data from Fiji and Tonga to estimate the impact of migration and remittances on income distribution and measures of poverty, after controlling for selectivity in migration and endogeneity in the relationship between remittances and income. Measures of inequality and poverty based on actual, with-migration income and remittances are then compared with those ...

Most papers on high-dimensional statistics are based on the assumption that none of the regressors are correlated with the regression error, namely, they are exogenous. Yet, endogeneity can arise incidentally from a large pool of regressors in a high-dimensional regression. This causes the inconsistency of the penalized least-squares method and possible false scientific discoveries. A necessary...