What does it mean to be in the informal sector? Many characterizations have been used in the literature, for example, firms that are unregistered or employ a small workforce or firms/economic enterprises that do not have access to formal capital markets. But many people participate in both...

The recent literature on instrumental variables (IV) features models in which agents sort into treatment status on the basis of gains from treatment as well as on baseline-pretreatment levels. Components of the gains known to the agents and acted on by them may not be known by the observing...

Instrumental variables (IV) is an indispensable tool for establishing causal relationships between variables. Recent work has focused on improving bounds for cases when an ideal instrument does not exist. We leverage a principle, "Intransitivity in Correlations," related to an under-utilized...

This paper considers the problem of aggregation in the case of large linear dynamic panels, where each micro unit is potentially related to all other micro units, and where micro innovations are allowed to be cross sectionally dependent. Following Pesaran (2003), an optimal aggregate function is...

We propose using sign restrictions to identify regional labor demand shocks in a panel VAR of US federal states. Observed migration responds significantly, but less persistently than the residual-based migration measure constructed by Blanchard and Katz (1992)

Over the past two decades, technological progress has been biased towards making skilled labor more productive. What does skill-biased technological change imply for business cycles? To answer this question, we construct a quarterly series for the skill premium from the CPS and use it to...

Recent events suggest that uncertainty changes play a major role in U.S. labor market fluctuations. This study analyzes the impact of uncertainty shocks on unemployment dynamics. Using a vector autoregression approach, we show that uncertainty shocks measured by stock market volatility have a...

This paper introduces a novel approach for dealing with the 'curse of dimensionality' in the case of large linear dynamic systems. Restrictions on the coefficients of an unrestricted VAR are proposed that are binding only in a limit as the number of endogenous variables tends to infinity. It is...