We consider the issue of Block Bootstrap methods in processes that exhibit strong dependence. The main difficulty is to transform the series in such way that implementation of these techniques can provide an accurate approximation to the true distribution of the test statistic under...

This paper studies optimal decision rules for a decision maker who can consult two experts in an environment without monetary payments. This extends the previous work by Holmström (1984) and Alonso and Matouschek (2008) who consider environments with one expert. In order to derive optimal...

The prevailing usage of the concept of complex humanitarian emergency, even if valuable, is often fuzzy and misleading, and rarely articulated in a consistent framework, which could be used advantageously for research, interdisciplinary exchange, and policy making and analysis. We analyse...

Existing studies of trust formation in U.S. metropolitan areas have found that trust is lower when there is more income inequality and greater racial fragmentation. I add to this literature by examining the role of income inequality between racial groups (racial income inequality). I find that...

This paper presents a new numerical method for pricing American call options when the volatility of the price of the underlying stock is stochastic. By exploiting a log-linear relationship of the optimal exercise boundary with respect to volatility changes, we derive an integral representation...

This paper extends Carroll's (2006) endogenous grid method and its combination with value function iteration by Barillas and Fernández-Villaverde (2007) to non-concave problems. The method is illustrated using a consumer problem in which consumers choose both durable and non-durable...

Testing the rank of a matrix of estimated parameters is key in a large variety of econometric modelling scenarios. This paper describes general methods to test for the rank of a matrix, and provides details on a variety of modelling scenarios in the econometrics literature where these tests are...

Identification in the context of multivariate state space modelling involves the specification of the dimension of the state vector. One identification approach requires an estimate of the rank of a Hankel matrix. The most frequently used approaches of rank determination rely on information...

In this paper we provide tests for the unit root hypothesis against the occurence of an unspecified number of breaks which may be larger than 2 but smaller that the maximum allowed number of breaks, <i>m</i>, in univariate time series models. The advocated procedure is considerably less computationally...

Panel datasets have been increasingly used in economics to analyse complex economic phenomena. One of the attractions of panel datasets is the ability to use an extended dataset to obtain information about parameters of interest which are assumed to have common values across panel units....