Do Patients With More Education Receive More Subsidized Dental Care? Evidence From a Natural Experiment Using the Introduction of a School Reform in Norway as an Instrumental Variable

There has been a fundamental flaw in the conceptual design of many natural experiments used in the economics literature, particularly among studies aiming to estimate a local average treatment effect (LATE). When we use an instrumental variable (IV) to estimate a LATE, the IV only has an indirect effect on the treatment of interest. Such IVs do not work as intended and will produce severely biased and/or uninterpretable results. This comment demonstrates that the LATE does not work as previously thought and explains why using the natural experiment proposed by Angrist and Evans (1998) as the example.

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What Questions Are You Inclined to Answer? Effects of Hierarchy in Corporate Q&A Communities

Information Systems Research ◽

10.1287/isre.2021.1052 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Jingchuan Pu ◽

Yang Liu ◽

Yuan Chen ◽

Liangfei Qiu ◽

Hsing Kenneth Cheng

Keyword(s):

Knowledge Sharing ◽

Instrumental Variable ◽

Online Community ◽

Natural Experiment ◽

Online Discussion ◽

Discussion Groups ◽

Question And Answer

Are employees willing to voluntarily share knowledge with their higher-ups? The existing studies show that the answer is no—employees are less likely to share knowledge with their higher-ups in the offline setting, corporate wikis, and online discussion groups. We answer the same question in a corporate question-and-answer (Q&A) community and argue that the answer can be yes. A potential-dyads approach and a quasi-natural experiment jointly demonstrate that employees are inclined to answer a question from their higher-ups and even exert more effort in those answers. Using an instrumental-variable design, we show that users who post more answers to higher-ranked individuals and who display greater effort in those answers are more likely to get promoted in subsequent years, meaning that employees do not need to worry about their careers when sharing knowledge with their higher-ups in corporate Q&A communities. Our research, together with research on other contexts, are useful for companies to take the role of the managers into account when considering which type of online community to adopt. Community designers can use our findings to better motivate knowledge sharing by considering users’ different job ranks.

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Immigrant supply of marketable child care and native fertility in Italy

Journal of Demographic Economics ◽

10.1017/dem.2021.28 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 1-31

Author(s):

R. D. Mariani ◽

F. C. Rosati

Keyword(s):

Child Care ◽

Instrumental Variable ◽

Natural Experiment ◽

Recent Past ◽

Difference In Differences ◽

Female Workers ◽

Care Services ◽

Variable Approach ◽

Child Care Services ◽

Instrumental Variable Approach

Abstract The availability of child-care services has often been advocated as one of the instruments to counter the fertility decline observed in many high-income countries. In the recent past, large inflows of low-skilled migrants have substantially increased the supply of child-care services. In this paper, we examine if immigration has actually affected fertility exploiting the natural experiment occurred in Italy in 2007, when a large inflow of migrants—many of them specialized in the supply of child care—arrived unexpectedly. With a difference-in-differences method, we show that immigrant female workers have increased native births by a number that ranges roughly from 2% to 4%. We validate our result by the implementation of an instrumental variable approach and several robustness tests, all concluding that the increase in the supply of child-care services by immigrant women has positively affected native fertility.

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Educational inequalities in access to fixed prosthodontic treatment in Norway. Causal effects using the introduction of a school reform as an instrumental variable

Social Science & Medicine ◽

10.1016/j.socscimed.2020.113105 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 260 ◽

pp. 113105

Author(s):

Jostein Grytten ◽

Irene Skau

Keyword(s):

School Reform ◽

Instrumental Variable ◽

Causal Effects ◽

Educational Inequalities

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Fans and Match Results: Evidence From a Natural Experiment in Brazil

Journal of Sports Economics ◽

10.1177/1527002520930812 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 21 (7) ◽

pp. 663-687 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Carlos Alberto Belchior

Keyword(s):

Instrumental Variable ◽

Natural Experiment ◽

Home Team ◽

Alternative Schedule ◽

Crowd Size

This paper assesses the effect of the crowd size on home team advantage, using a natural experiment occurred in Brazilian football. In 2015, the Brazilian Football Confederation (CBF) quasi-randomly assigned games to be played under an alternative schedule on Sundays at 11 a.m. This measure significantly increased attendance in assigned games. Using this alternative schedule as an instrumental variable, we show that the exogenous increase in attendance did not increase home team advantage.

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