We find evidence of a cyclical and seasonal bias in the annual benchmark revisions to the monthly level of non-farm payroll employment. We propose a change to the methodology that would remove the seasonal bias and ensure that the benchmark process does not artificially influence the estimated...

A particular robust regression estimator has gained popularity among applied econometricians. We show that this estimator is inconsistent for the parameters of the conditional mean when the errors are skewed and heteroskedastic, and conclude that therefore its use cannot be generally recommended.

In this paper we propose new estimation techniques in connection with regression models whose errors have distributions which are members of the celebrated Pearson’s system. Efficient MCMC procedures are proposed in the context of likelihood—based inference. The new techniques are applied to...

We examine the distributions of Chinese and Indian city sizes for seven decades (1950s to 2010s) using lognormal, Pareto, and general Pareto distributions. We ascertain which distribution fits the data and how the city size distributions change during these periods. The Chinese city size...

I derive a rigorous method to help determine whether a true parameter takes a value between two arbitrarily chosen points for a given level of confidence via a multiple testing procedure which strongly controls the familywise error rate. For any test size, the distance between the upper and...

We study a regression model with a binary explanatory variable that is subject to misclassification errors. The regression coefficient is then only partially identified. We derive several results that relate different assumptions about the misclassification probabilities and the conditional...

We demonstrate that Big-Five personality traits are stable for working-age adults over a four-year period. Mean population changes are small and constant across age groups. Intra-individual changes are generally unrelated to adverse life events and are not economically meaningful.

Analyses using aggregated data may bias inference. In this work we show how to aggregate data to avoid or at least reduce this bias when estimating quantile regressions.

The present paper shows that a DSGE model can be represented by a finite order VAR if and only if the eigenvalues of the matrix defined in Fernández-Villaverde et al. (2007) are all equal to zero. Further it shows that this condition is equivalent to the unimodularity condition presented...

Adapting a methodology proposed in Das et al. (2011), this paper uses panel refreshments as a natural experiment to determine whether trends in stated utility measures observed in panel data are genuine or rather caused by measurement issues.