The social and academic reputation of private universities in Japan is generally far behind the national universities. We argue that heavy subsidy and the low tuition of national universities determined by the central government are both responsible for making the production of high academic...

This paper examines the performance of the U.S.~commercial banking industry over 1984--2002. Rather than measuring performance relative to the unknown (and difficult-to-estimate) boundary of the production set, performance for a given bank is measured relative to {\it expected} maximum output...

This paper examines the effects of inter-school competition on student outcomes by using exogenous variation in the availability of private schools in Chile. Given that naïve estimates of the effects of competition on student outcomes are biased by endogenous entry of schools, this paper uses...

In this paper, we show that when the government is able to transfer wealth between generations, regressive policies are no longer optimal. The optimal educational policy can be decentralized through appropriate Pigouvian taxes and credit provision, is not regressive, and provides equality of...

Much of the statistical analysis for poverty measurement regards the data employed to estimate poverty statistics as error-free observations. However, it is amply recognized that surveys responses are not perfectly reliable and that the quality of the data is often poor, especially for...

We study participation and relative earnings in the formal, informal, and self-employed sectors in Bolivia. We estimate quantile earnings equations corrected for self-selectivity to address potential biases in the estimates of relative earnings gaps due to the endogeneity of sector...

Within the independent private-values paradigm, we derive the data-generating process of the winning bid for the last unit sold at sequential English auctions when bidder valuations are draws from one of several different classes of distributions; i.e., in the presence of asymmetries. When the...

A leading explanation of aggregate stock market behavior suggests that assets are priced as if there were a representative investor whose utility is a power function of the difference between aggregate consumption and a "habit" level, where the habit is some function of lagged and (possibly)...

In this paper, we propose a method of analyzing time series in the spatial domain. The analysis is based on the inference on the local time and its expectation. Both for the stationary and nonstationary time series, the spatial distributions are provided by the local time, and some of their...