This study estimates the effect of compulsory schooling on earnings. For identification, I exploit a German reform that extended the duration of secondary schooling in the 1960s. I find that hourly wages increase by 6%-8% per additional year of schooling. This result challenges prior findings...

Small businesses tend to be owned by wealthy households. Such entrepreneur households also own a large share of U.S. stock market wealth. Fluctuations in entrepreneurs' hunger for risk could therefore help explain time variation in the equity premium. The paper suggests an entrepreneurial...

This paper analyzes a closed, essentially linear polycentric city with homogenous households who probabilistically select their workplace and residence locations. The study utilizes a continuous logit model to describe household location choices. In contrast to the classic urban model with...

This paper examines several US monthly financial time series data using fractional integration and cointegration techniques. The univariate analysis based on fractional integration aims to determine whether the series are I(1) (in which case markets might be efficient) or alternatively I(d) with...

Previous estimates of inequality of opportunity (IOp) are lower bounds because of the unobservability of the full set of endowed characteristics beyond the sphere of individual responsibility. Knowing the true size of unfair IOp, however, is important for the acceptance of (some) inequality and...

This paper analyses the long-memory properties of a high-frequency financial time series dataset. It focuses on temporal aggregation and other features of the data, and how they might affect the degree of dependence of the series. Fractional integration or I(d) models are estimated with a...

The use of large datasets for macroeconomic forecasting has received a great deal of interest recently. Boosting is one possible method of using high-dimensional data for this purpose. It is a stage-wise additive modelling procedure, which, in a linear specification, becomes a variable selection...

This paper uses long-range dependence techniques to analyse two important features of the US Federal Funds effective rate, namely its persistence and cyclical behaviour. It examines annual, monthly, bi-weekly and weekly data, from 1954 until 2010. Two models are considered. One is based on an...

In this paper we examine the role of mortgage equity withdrawal in explaining the decline of the US saving rate, since when house prices rise and mortgage rates are low, homeowners have an incentive to withdraw housing equity and this may affect the saving rate. We estimate a Vector Error...

We present a heterogeneous-firm model in which management ability increases both pro- duction efficiency and product quality. Combining six micro-datasets on management practices, production and trade in Chinese and American firms, we find broad support for the model's predictions. First, better...