This paper develops a statistical aggregation procedure for the Frisch elasticity of labor supply. It allows for worker heterogeneity and is applicable to an individual labor supply function with non-employment as a possible outcome. Subjecting all offered or paid wages to an unanticipated...

The recent literature exploiting natural events as "natural experiment" instruments is reviewed to assess to what extent it has advanced empirical knowledge. A weakness of the studies that adopt this approach is that the necessary set of behavioral, market, and technological assumptions made by...

In DSGE models, fiscal policy is typically described by simple rules in which tax rates respond to the level of output. We show that there is only weak empirical evidence in favor of such specifications in U.S. data. Instead, the cyclical movements of labor and capital income tax rates are...

We discuss “Mandatory IFRS Reporting and Changes in Enforcement” by Christensen, Hail, and Leuz (CHL, in this issue). We begin by discussing CHL in the context of prior literature, and subsequently discuss the research design, results, and inferences. CHL seeks to contribute to the...

The derived structural estimates of the system βY=γZ+δU impose identifying restrictions on the reduced form estimates ex post. Some or all of the derived structural estimates are presented as evidence of the model's efficacy. In fact, the reduced form inherits a great deal of information from...

This paper reconsiders the degree to which the sign patterns of hypothesized structural arrays limit the possible outcomes for the sign pattern of the corresponding estimated reduced form. The conditions under which any structural restrictions would apply were believed to be very narrow, rarely...