How do customer loyalty programs create switching costs? We estimate the demand effects of tier levels within a frequent flier program by exploiting discrete tier thresholds. We have two main results. First, members increase demand to reach a higher tier level just before the end of the calendar...

This paper examines the evolution of the returns to education in Portugal over the 1980s andearly 1990s. The main findings indicate that the returns to education have increased,particularly after joining the European Union in 1986. Since this occurred along with anincrease in the level of...

The perpetual inventory method used for the construction of education data per country leads to systematic measurement error. This paper analyses the effect of this measurement error on GDP regressions. There is a systematic difference in the education level between census data and observations...

This paper reviews and addresses a variety of issues relating to inclusive fitness. The main question is: are there limits to the generality of inclusive fitness, and if so, what are the perimeters of the domain within which inclusive fitness works? This question is addressed using two well...

Regarding the asymmetric and leptokurtic behavior of financial data, we propose a new contagion test in the quantile regression framework that is robust to model misspecification. Unlike conventional correlation-based tests, the proposed quantile contagion test allows us to investigate the stock...

Regression analyses of cross-country economic growth data are complicated by two main forms of model uncertainty: the uncertainty in selecting explanatory variables and the uncertainty in specifying the functional form of the regression function. Most discussions in the literature address these...