We employ a latent class model to assess the impact of Mexico's Seguro Popular ("SP") program on the number of prenatal visits in a cross-sectional sample of 4,381 women who gave birth during 2002-2005. We specify an ordered probit model to permit a pregnant woman's probability of membership in...

We propose and solve a small-scale New-Keynesian model with Markov sunspot shocks that move the economy between a targeted-inflation regime and a deflation regime and fit it to data from the U.S. and Japan. For the U.S. we find that adverse demand shocks have moved the economy to the zero lower...

Uncertainty associated with the monetary policy transmission mechanism is a key driving force of business cycles. To investigate this link, we propose a new term structure model that allows the volatility of the yield curve to interact with macroeconomic indicators. The data favors a model with...

We characterize the response of U.S., German and British stock, bond and foreign exchange markets to real-time U.S. macroeconomic news. Our analysis is based on a unique data set of high-frequency futures returns for each of the markets. We find that news surprises produce conditional mean...

This paper explores ways to integrate model uncertainty into policy evaluation. We first describe a general framework for the incorporation of model uncertainty into standard econometric calculations. This framework employs Bayesian model averaging methods that have begun to appear in a range of...

This paper empirically assesses the wage effects of the Job Corps program, one of the largest federally-funded job training programs in the United States. Even with the aid of a randomized experiment, the impact of a training program on wages is difficult to study because of sample selection, a...

This paper discusses inference for rational expectations models estimated via minimum distance methods by characterizing the probability beliefs regarding the data generating process (DGP) that are compatible with given moment conditions. The null hypothesis is taken to be rational expectations...

This review paper articulates the relationship between prediction market data and event studies, with a special focus on applications in political economy. Event studies have been used to address a variety of political economy questions from the economic effects of party control of government to...

News--or foresight--about future economic fundamentals can create rational expectations equilibria with non-fundamental representations that pose substantial challenges to econometric efforts to recover the structural shocks to which economic agents react. Using tax policies as a leading example...

I translate familiar concepts of discrete-time time-series to contnuous-time equivalent. I cover lag operators, ARMA models, the relation between levels and differences, integration and cointegration, and the Hansen-Sargent prediction formulas.