The economies of the former Soviet Bloc experienced large declines in output during the decade of transition which began with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Yet there are many reasons to believe that measured output and official deflators provide a poor proxy for the change in real...

In this presentation I view a Malmquist productivity index as a theoretical index with desirable properties. I then discuss the properties of three approximations to it: an empirical Malmquist index, and Fisher and Tornqvist indexes. Next I discuss the decomposition properties of the theoretical...

We define a segregation ordering as a ranking of cities from most segregated to least segregated. \ We propose a set of basic properties that any reasonable segregation ordering should have. \ We then fully characterize the class of segregation orderings that satisfy these basic properties. \ We...

In applied econometric literature, the causal inferences are often made based on highly temporally aggregated or systematically sampled data. A number of theoretical studies have pointed out that temporal aggregation has distorting effects on causal inference and systematic sampling preserves...

The Stock--Watson coincident index and its subsequent extensions assume a static linear one-factor model for the component indicators. Such assumption is restrictive in practice, however, with as few as four indicators. In fact, such assumption is unnecessary if one poses the index construction...

To understand the consequences of the presence of international safety nets on governments' incentives to undertake reforms, we model IFIs´ interventions as country insurance policies. We find that country insurance (especially when made contingent on negative external shocks) is more likely...

Using a generalized cross-spectral approach, we propose a model-free omnibus statistical procedure to check whether the direction of changes in an economic variable is predictable using the history of its past changes. A class of separate inference procedures are also given to gauge possible...

The recent wave of financial crises has fueled the debate on the effect of IFIs intervention on governments' incentives to undertake reforms. In this paper we treat this intervention more generally as a country insurance contract, and examine its implications in a stylized set-up. More...

The large wealth and consumption inequality in the U.S. is usually attributed to two market frictions: debt constraints and incomplete markets. Recent literature has argued that debt constraints are the critical friction while market incompleteness plays only a secondary role. We evaluate the...