Dongwoo Kim

Dongwoo Kim

Dongwoo Kim - Website

Research interests

Primary: Microeconometrics, Applied Econometrics
Secondary: Health Economics, Labour Economics, Empirical IO

Paper title - 'Partially Identifying Competing Risks Models: Applications to the War on Cancer and Unemployment Spells'

Abstract - Competing risks models (CRMs) for discretely measured or interval censored durations are partially identifying because of 1) the unknown dependence structure between latent durations; and 2) the discrete nature of the outcome. I derive highly tractable bounds for underlying distributions of latent durations by exploiting the discreteness and investigate identifying power of restrictions on the dependence structure. Bounds are obtained from a system of simultaneous nonlinear (in)equalities. I devise a simple solution method that requires much less computational burden compared to existing methods. Asymptotic properties of bound estimators and a simple bootstrap procedure are provided. The usefulness of the proposed approach is illustrated in two empirical applications. I revisit the “war on cancer” data studied in Honore and Lleras-Muney (2006) and evaluate up-to-date trends in cancer mortality. I find substantial improvements in cancer mortality. Estimated patterns differ from the original findings. In another application, effects of extended unemployment benefits on unemployment spells are investigated using data from Farber et al. (2015). Bound estimates support the original finding that extended benefits did not discourage active job seekers.

References

• Andrew Chesher (UCL)
• Toru Kitagawa (UCL)
• Sokbae “Simon” Lee (Columbia)
• Daniel Wilhelm (UCL)