The conventional approach to retirement and life insurance planning, which is used throughout the financial planning industry, differs markedly from the economic approach. The conventional approach asks households to specify how much they want to spend before retirement, after retirement, and in...

A substantial amount of money is spent on technology by schools, families and policymakers with the hope of improving educational outcomes. This paper explores the theoretical and empirical literature on the impacts of technology on educational outcomes. The literature focuses on two primary...

We consider problems originating in economics that may be solved automatically using mathematical software. We present and make freely available a new benchmark set of such problems. The problems have been shown to fall within the framework of non-linear real arithmetic, and so are in theory...

This guide provides a practical introduction to parallel computing in economics. After a brief introduction to the basic ideas of parallelization, we show how to parallelize a prototypical application in economics using, on CPUs, Julia, Matlab, R, Python, C++-OpenMP, Rcpp–OpenMP, and C++-MPI,...

Many applications involve a censored dependent variable and an endogenous independent variable. Chernozhukov, Fernandez-Val, and Kowalski (2015) introduced a censored quantile instrumental variable estimator (CQIV) for use in those applications, which has been applied by Kowalski (2016), among...

Improvements in the software that provides hardware management, user interface and platform functions have played a central role in the growth and transformation of the personal computer (PC) industry. Several forces shape the design of these 'operating system' products and propel their...

This paper documents the increasing importance of software for successful innovation in manufacturing sectors well beyond the traditional definition of electronics and information technology. Using panel data for 229 publicly listed firms from 18 countries across four manufacturing industries...

We present PublicationHarvester, an open-source software tool for gathering publication information on individual life scientists. The software interfaces with MEDLINE, and allows the end-user to specify up to four MEDLINE-formatted names for each researcher. Using these names along with a...

There has been a recent surge of interest in open source software development, which involves developers at many different locations and organizations sharing code to develop and refine programs. To an economist, the behavior of individual programmers and commercial companies engaged in open...

Using a unique and comprehensive data source, we measure price changes for Microsoft's desktop personal computer software products during the time period July 1993 through June 2001. This paper contributes to a relatively small literature on price measurement of pre-packaged software by...