Total Factor Productivity (TFP) growth in Canada between 2002 and 2014 has been only 0.16% per year. Although many developed countries have experienced a productivity slowdown since the beginning of the century, this figure is still substantially smaller than that of the U.S. We perform multiple...

We incorporate shocks to the efficiency with which firms learn from production activity and accumulate knowledge into an otherwise standard real DSGE model with imperfect competition. Using real aggregate data and Bayesian inference techniques, we find that learning efficiency shocks are an...

Prominent features of differentiated product markets are segmentation and product proliferation that blurs the boundaries between segments. I develop a tractable demand model, the Ordered Nested Logit, which allows for over lap between neighboring segments. I apply the model to the automobile...

We study a labor market where firm have private information about their ex-ante heterogeneous productivities and search is random. In this environment, a binding minimum wage can be efficiency-enhancing -- we show that setting it using a version of the Vickery-Clarke-Groves mechanism delivers...

We measure the gains from a trade cost reduction in a model with dynamic accumulation of factors. We show that the tight link between import intensity and gains from trade that exists in static models breaks down along transition paths in dynamic models. When trade costs are reduced, the need to...

This paper studies costly pre-CEO executive skill accumulation by executives, followed by stable matching between firms and CEOs. An increase in the heterogeneity of firm size relative to executive type induces a decrease in the informational effect of skill accumulation, resulting in...

A number of tests have been proposed for assessing the location-scale assumption that is often invoked by practitioners. Existing approaches include Kolmogorov-Smirnov and Cramer-von-Mises statistics that each involve measures of divergence between unknown joint distribution functions and...

In this paper we propose a nonparametric methodology designed to facilitate the statistical analysis of complex systems. The proposed approach exploits an ensemble of nonparametric techniques including conditional density function estimation, conditional distribution function estimation,...

This paper discusses how childcare and parental leave policies affect female employment by reviewing the international evidence and recent papers on Japan. These papers estimate causal effects of policies by exploiting policy changes, which is a more credible identification strategy than earlier...

Though parametric methods are popular in applied settings, practitioners often require nonparametric alternatives. However, fully nonparametric methods are known to suffer from the curse of dimensionality, which limits their practical application. Semiparametric methods occupy a middle ground,...