This paper generalizes the gross exports accounting framework, initially proposed by Koopman, Wang, and Wei (2014) for a country's aggregate exports, to one at the sector, bilateral, and bilateral-sector levels. Such a generalization requires a conceptual distinction between value added exports...

Medical-care expenditures have been rising rapidly, accounting for over 17 percent of GDP in 2012. In this study, we assess the sources of the rising medical-care expenditures in the commercial sector. We employ a novel framework for decomposing expenditure growth into four components at the...

To what extent is the length of our lives determined by pre-birth factors? And to what extent is it affected by parental resources during our upbringing that can be influenced by public policy? We study the formation of adult health and mortality using data on about 21,000 adoptees born between...

I decompose Virginia's paper money into expected real-asset present value, risk discount, and transaction premium or “moneyness” value. The value of Virginia's paper money was determined primarily by its real-asset present value. The transaction premium was small. Positive risk discounts...

This paper uses simulations to explore the properties of the HP filter of Hodrick and Prescott (1997), the BK filter of Baxter and King (1999), and the H filter of Hamilton (2018) that are designed to decompose a univariate time series into trend and cyclical components. Each simulated time...

This paper shows that unexpected stock returns must be associated with changes in expected future dividends or expected future returns A vector autoregressive method is used to break unexpected stock returns into these two components. In U.S. monthly data in 1927-88, one-third of the variance of...

We propose and study properties of several estimators of variance decomposition in the local-projections framework. We find for empirically relevant sample sizes that, after being bias corrected with bootstrap, our estimators perform well in simulations. We also illustrate the workings of our...

We present a new empirical decomposition of the effects of financial liberalization on economic growth and on the incidence of crises. Our empirical estimates show that the direct effect of financial liberalization on growth by far outweighs the indirect effect via a higher propensity to crisis....

Given the challenges in quantifying the role of human capital on economic development, measuring human capital itself becomes an important issue. It is desirable to have a comprehensive human capital measure that goes beyond the traditional measures based on education attainment, yet is...

Reporting point estimates and error bands for structural vector autoregressions that are only set identified is a very common practice. However, unless the researcher is persuaded on the basis of prior information that some parameter values are more plausible than others, this common practice...