By 1989 the Michigan Panel Study on Income Dynamics (PSID) had experienced approximately 50 percent sample loss from cumulative attrition from its initial 1968 membership. We study the effect of this attrition on the unconditional distributions of several socioeconomic variables and on the...

This paper establishes stochastic equicontinuity for classes of mixingales. Attention is restricted to Lipschitz-continuous parametric functions. Unlike some other empirical process theory for dependent data, our results do not require bounded functions, stationary processes, or restrictive...

Some public policies aimed at integrating welfare recipients into the world of work are predicated on the premise that getting welfare recipients to work will change their beliefs about how they will be treated in the labor market. This paper explores the rationale for these policies and...

This paper presents a framework for the evaluation and measurement of reversal and origin independence as separate aspects of economic mobility. We show how that evaluation depends on aversion to multi-period inequality, aversion to inter-temporal fluctuations, and aversion to second-period...

Transitivity is a fundamental axiom in Economics that appears in consumer theory, decision under uncertainty, and social choice theory. While the appeal of transitivity is obvious, observed choices sometimes contradict it. This paper shows that treatments of violations of transitivity al- ready...

Preferences may arise from regret, i.e., from comparisons with alternatives forgone by the decision maker. We ask whether regret-based behavior is consistent with non-expected utility theories of transitive choice. We show that the answer is no. If choices are governed by ex ante regret and...

We use the Michigan Panel Data Study on Income Dynamics to decompose the well-known rise in cross-sectional variance of individual male earnings in the U.S. into permanent and transitory components. We find that about half of the increase has arisen from an increase in the variance of permanent...

We derive the efficiency loss from using grouped data to estimate coefficients of variables that vary across groups but not individuals within a group (e.g., state unemployment rates) when micro data are unavailable on the dependent variable. We present an empirical example of our theoretical...

Rabin proved that a low level of risk aversion with respect to small gambles leads to a high, and absurd, level of risk aversion with respect to large gambles. Rabin's arguments strongly depend on expected utility theory, but we show that similar arguments apply to almost all non-expected...

In the past decade, we have seen the development of a new set of tests for structural change of unknown timing in regression models, most notably the SupF statistic of Andrews (1993), the ExpF and AveF statistics of Andrews-Ploberger (1994), and the L statistic of Nyblom (1989). The distribution...