Many river basins will likely face higher hydrologic variability, including extreme floods and droughts, due to climate change, with economic and political consequences. Water treaties that govern international basins could face non-compliance among riparians and inter-state tensions as...

The econometrics literature proposed several new causal machine learning methods (CML) in the past few years. These methods harness the strength of machine learning methods to flexibly model the relationship between the treatment, outcome and confounders, while providing valid inferential...

A novel debate within competition policy and regulation circles is whether autonomous machine learning algorithms may learn to collude on prices. We show that when fims face short-run price commitments, independent Q-learning (a simple but well-established self-learning algorithm) learns to...

This paper features an analysis of major currency exchange rate movements in relation to the US dollar, as constituted in US dollar terms. Euro, British pound, Chinese yuan, and Japanese yen are modelled using a variety of non-linear models, including smooth transition regression models,...

Forecasts from various experts are often used in macroeconomic forecasting models. Usually the focus is on the mean or median of the survey data. In the present study we adopt a different perspective on the survey data as we examine the predictive power of disagreement amongst forecasters. The...

Two of the fastest growing frontiers in econometrics and quantitative finance are time series and financial econometrics. Significant theoretical contributions to financial econometrics have been made by experts in statistics, econometrics, mathematics, and time series analysis. The purpose of...

This paper features an analysis of the cointegration relationships among agricultural commodity, ethanol and Cushing crude oil spot and futures prices. The use of grains for the creation of bio-fuels has sparked fears that these demands are inflating food prices. We analyse approximately 10...

We consider a new copula method for mixed marginals of discrete and continuous random variables. Unlike the Bayesian methods in the literature, we use maximum likelihood estimation based on closed-form copula functions. We show with a simulation that our methodology performs similar to the...

This paper explores how a conditional cash transfer program influences students' schooling decisions when program payments stop in the middle of the school career. To that end, I examine Mexico's Progresa, which covered students only until the end of middle school (at age 15) in its early years....