Community colleges have become an important entryway for students intending to complete a baccalaureate degree. However, many question the viability of the transfer function and wonder whether students suffer a penalty for starting at a two-year institution. This paper examines how the outcomes...

This article develops a direct filtration-based maximum likelihood methodology for estimating the parameters and realizations of latent affine processes. The equivalent of Bayes' rule is derived for recursively updating the joint characteristic function of latent variables and the data...

This paper is the first systematic attempt to measure the existence and degree of dowry inflation in South Asia. The popular press and scholarly literature have assumed dowry inflation in South Asia for some time, and there are now a number of theoretical papers that have attempted to explain...

Volatility has been one of the most active and successful areas of research in time series econometrics and economic forecasting in recent decades. This chapter provides a selective survey of the most important theoretical developments and empirical insights to emerge from this burgeoning...

This paper proposes a method for separating economic time series into a smooth component whose mean varies over time (the trend') and a stationary component (the cycle'). The aim is to make the trends as smooth as possible while also producing cycles with plausible properties. While the main...

During the early 1980s, earnings inequality in the U.S. labor market rose relatively uniformly throughout the wage distribution. But this uniformity gave way to a significant divergence starting in 1987, with upper-tail (90/50) inequality rising steadily and lower tail (50/10) inequality either...