In this paper, we quantitatively assess the welfare implications of alternative public education spending rules. To this end, we employ a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model in which human capital externalities and public education expenditures, financed by distorting taxes, enhance the...

This article takes issue with a recent book by Ziliak and McCloskey (2008) of the same title. Ziliak and McCloskey argue that statistical significance testing is a barrier rather than a booster for empirical research in many fields and should therefore be abandoned altogether. The present...

In this paper we propose a novel way to model the labor market in the context of a New-Keynesian general equilibrium model, incorporating labor market frictions in the form of hiring and firing costs. We show that such a model is able to replicate many important stylized facts of the business...

For a long time, migration has been subject to intensive economic research. Nevertheless, empirical evidence regarding the determinants of migration still appears to be incomplete. In this paper, we analyze the effects of socio-economic and institutional determinants, especially labor-market...

Much of the literature on the economics of mortgage markets has studied the FRM-ARM choice made by individual borrowers. However, to decide if the outcome of such a choice is efficient or approximately so, it is necessary to explore the question of optimal risk-sharing in mortgage contracts. But...

We develop an efficient and easy-to-use computational method for solving a wide class of general equilibrium heterogeneous agent models with aggregate shocks, together with an open source suite of codes that implement our algorithms in an easy-to-use toolbox. Our method extends standard...

This paper proposes a quantile regression estimator for a heterogeneous panel model with lagged dependent variables and interactive effects. The paper adopts the Common Correlated Effects (CCE) approach proposed by Pesaran (2006) and Chudik and Pesaran (2015) and demonstrates that the extension...

We identify externalities in human capital production function arising from sibling spillovers. Using regression discontinuity design generated by school-entry cutoffs and school records from one district in Florida, we find positive spillover effects from an older to a younger child in less...

This paper is concerned with problem of variable selection and forecasting in the presence of parameter instability. There are a number of approaches proposed for forecasting in the presence of breaks, including the use of rolling windows or exponential down-weighting. However, these studies...

We study response behavior in surveys and show how the explanatory power of self-reports can be improved. First, we develop a choice model of survey response behavior under the assumption that the respondent has imperfect self-knowledge about her individual characteristics. In panel data, the...