This paper uses data available from the National Opinion Research Center's (NORC) survey on religious attitudes and powerful statistical methods to evaluate the effect of prayer on the attitude of God toward human beings. -- Kernel estimator ; unobserved variables

We develop a multivariate unobserved components model to extract business cycle and financial cycle indicators from a panel of economic and financial time series of four large developed economies. Our model is flexible and allows for the inclusion of cycle components in different selections of...

Ethnicity has become an increasingly important factor in neighborhood formation in many developed economies. We specify a gravity model for neighborhoods to assess the role of ethnicity in intra-urban residential relocations. Migration patterns of different ethnic groups are hypothesized to...

In this paper we present an exact maximum likelihood treatment forthe estimation of a Stochastic Volatility in Mean(SVM) model based on Monte Carlo simulation methods. The SVM modelincorporates the unobserved volatility as anexplanatory variable in the mean equation. The same extension...

Accident costs are an important component of the external costs of traffic, a substantial part of whichis related to fatal accidents. The evaluation of fatal accident costs crucially depends on theavailability of an estimate for the economic value of a statistical life. The aim of the...

This paper examines the performance of the JTPA performance system, a widely emulated model for inducing efficiency in government organizations. We present a model of how performance incentives may distort bureaucratic decisions. We define cream skimming within the model. Two major empirical...

We advocate the use of absolute moment ratio statistics in conjunctionwith standard variance ratio statistics in order to disentangle lineardependence, non-linear dependence, and leptokurtosis in financial timeseries. Both statistics are computed for multiple return horizonssimultaneously, and...

We test whether asymmetric preferences for losses versus gains as in Ang, Chen, and Xing (2006) also affect the pricing of cash flow versus discount rate news as in Campbell and Vuolteenaho (2004). We construct a new four-fold beta decomposition, distinguishing cash flow and discount rate betas...

We introduce a new efficient importance sampler for nonlinear non-Gaussian state space models. We propose a general and efficient likelihood evaluation method for this class of models via the combination of numerical and Monte Carlo integration methods. Our methodology explores the idea that...