In this paper I analyze whether international trade contributes to per capita income convergence across countries. The analysis focuses on four important post-1945 multilateral trade liberalizations. To identify trade's effect on income dispersion, in each case I use a difference-in-differences'...

The recent literature on cross-country convergence of per capita income has largely ignored international trade. The reason might be perspective. Most convergence papers frame the analysis in a `Solow world' in which countries exist independent of one another. But most international trade...

Techniques of regulated Brownian motion are used to analyze the behavior of the exchange rate when official policy reaction functions are subject to future stochastic changes. We examine exchange-rate dynamics in alternative cases where the authorities promise (i) to confine a floating rate...

We propose a novel method to estimate dynamic equilibrium models with stochastic volatility. First, we characterize the properties of the solution to this class of models. Second, we take advantage of the results about the structure of the solution to build a sequential Monte Carlo algorithm to...

We estimate the trend in the transitory variance of male earnings in the U.S. using the Michigan Panel Study of Income Dynamics from 1970 to 2004. Using both an error components model as well as simpler but only approximate methods, we find that the transitory variance started to increase in the...

This paper analyzes optimal portfolio choice and consumption with stochastic volatility in incomplete markets. Using the Duffie-Epstein (1992) formulation of recursive utility in continuous time, it shows that the optimal portfolio demand for stocks under stochastic volatility varies strongly...

We develop and implement a new method for maximum likelihood estimation in closed-form of stochastic volatility models. Using Monte Carlo simulations, we compare a full likelihood procedure, where an option price is inverted into the unobservable volatility state, to an approximate likelihood...

This paper extends the class of stochastic volatility diffusions for asset returns to encompass Poisson jumps of time-varying intensity. We find that any reasonably descriptive continuous-time model for equity-index returns must allow for discrete jumps as well as stochastic volatility with a...

We present an econometric method for estimating the parameters of a diffusion model from discretely sampled data. The estimator is transparent, adaptive, and inherits the asymptotic properties of the generally unattainable maximum likelihood estimator. We use this method to estimate a new...

We develop new procedures for maximum likelihood estimation of affine term structure models with spanned or unspanned stochastic volatility. Our approach uses linear regression to reduce the dimension of the numerical optimization problem yet it produces the same estimator as maximizing the...