According to the World Bank and the United Nations, human capital is the largest component of human wealth for most countries in the world. There is no question that human capital is critical to individual and society well-being and both present and future growth. This presentation draws upon an...

The importance of increments to an existing highway system depends upon their contributions to the accessibility provided by the existing network. Nearly 40 years ago, Mohring [1965] suggested this logic for planning optimal highway investment programs. He argued it could be implemented by...

In this paper we investigate the comparative properties of empirically-estimated monetary models of the U.S. economy. We make use of a new data base of models designed for such investigations. We focus on three representative models: the Christiano, Eichenbaum, Evans (2005) model, the Smets and...

For 35 leading painters who lived in France during the first century of modern art, this paper uses textbook illustrations as the basis for measuring the importance of both painters and individual paintings. The rankings pose an interesting puzzle: why do some of the greatest artists not produce...

Economists are obsessed with rankings of institutions, journals, or scholars according to the value of some feature of interest. These rankings are invariably computed using estimates rather than the true values of such features. As a result, there may be considerable uncertainty concerning the...

We investigate a method for eliciting relative poverty rankings that aggregates partial poverty rankings obtained from multiple individuals. We first demonstrate that the method works in principle, then apply it in urban Côte d'Ivoire. We find that constructed rankings are often incomplete, not...

It is common to rank different categories by means of preferences that are revealed through data on choices. A prominent example is the ranking of political candidates or parties using the estimated share of support each one receives in surveys or polls about political attitudes. Since these...

Various quasi-Newton methods periodically add a symmetric "correction" matrix of rank at most 2 to a matrix approximating some quantity A of interest (such as the Hessian of an objective function). In this paper we examine several ways to express a symmetric rank 2 matrix [delta] as the sum of...