This paper distills and extends recent research on the economics of human development and social mobility. It summarizes the evidence from diverse literatures on the importance of early life conditions in shaping multiple life skills and the evidence on critical and sensitive investment periods...

This paper develops the method of local instrumental variables for models with multiple, unordered treatments when treatment choice is determined by a nonparametric version of the multinomial choice model. Responses to interventions are permitted to be heterogeneous in a general way and agents...

We study the drift of stationary diffusion processes in a time series analysis of the autoregression function. A marked empirical process measures the difference between the nonparametric regression functions of two time series. We bootstrap the distribution of a Kolmogorov-Smirnov-type test...

We investigate optimal designs for discriminating between exponential regression models of different complexity, which are widely used in the biological sciences; see, e.g., Landaw (1995) or Gibaldi and Perrier (1982). We discuss different approaches for the construction of appropriate...

In banking the default behavior of the counterpart is of interest not only for the pricing of transactions under credit risk but also for the assessment of portfolio credit risk. We develop a test against the hypothesis that default intensities are constant over time within a homogeneous group...