Economists have long recognized that investors care differently about downside losses versus upside gains. Agents who place greater weight on downside risk demand additional compensation for holding stocks with high sensitivities to downside market movements. We show that the cross-section of...

It is well-known that size-adjustments based on Edgeworth expansions for the t-statistic perform poorly when instruments are weakly correlated with the endogenous explanatory variable. This paper shows, however, that the lack of Edgeworth expansions and bootstrap validity are not tied to the...

We investigate, by Monte Carlo methods, the finite sample properties of GMM procedures for conducting inference about statistics that are of interest in the business cycle literature. These statistics include the second moments of data filtered using the first difference and Hodrick-Prescott...

Stocks with greater downside risk, which is measured by higher correlations conditional on downside moves of the market, have higher returns. After controlling for the market beta, the size effect and the book-to-market effect, the average rate of return on stocks with the greatest downside risk...

Researchers have increasingly realized the need to account for within-group dependence in estimating standard errors of regression parameter estimates. The usual solution is to calculate cluster-robust standard errors that permit heteroskedasticity and within-cluster error correlation, but...

This paper shows a convenient way to test whether instrumental variables are correlated with individual effects in a panel data set. It shows that the correlated fixed effects specification tests developed by Hausman and Taylor (1981) extend in an analogous way to panel data sets with endogenous...

In this paper, we propose an extension of the productivity decomposition method developed by Olley & Pakes (1996). This extension provides an accounting for the contributions of both firm entry and exit to aggregate productivity changes. It breaks down the contribution of surviving firms into a...

Many believe that "big data" will transform business, government and other aspects of the economy. In this article we discuss how new data may impact economic policy and economic research. Large-scale administrative datasets and proprietary private sector data can greatly improve the way we...

Haavelmo's seminal 1943 paper is the first rigorous treatment of causality. In it, he distinguished the definition of causal parameters from their identification. He showed that causal parameters are defined using hypothetical models that assign variation to some of the inputs determining...

We introduce a simple and robust approach to answering two key questions in empirical auction analysis: discriminating between models of entry and quantifying the revenue gains from improving auction design. The approach builds on Bulow and Klemperer (1996), connecting their theoretical results...