This paper analyzes the career progression of skilled and unskilled workers, with a focus on how careers are affected by economic downturns and whether formal skills, acquired early on, can shield workers from the effect of recessions. Using detailed administrative data for Germany for numerous...

Using disaggregated production data we show that the size of seasonal cycles changes significantly over the course of the business cycle. In particular, during periods of high economy-wide activity, some industries smooth seasonal fluctuations while others exaggerate them. We interpret this...

Mean-variance efficient portfolios constructed using sample moments often involve taking extreme long and short positions. Hence practitioners often impose portfolio weight constraints when constructing efficient portfolios. Green and Hollifield (1992) argue that the presence of a single...

This paper derives indicators of the severity and structure of banking system risk from asymptotic interdependencies between banks%u2019 equity prices. We use new tools available from multivariate extreme value theory to estimate individual banks%u2019 exposure to each other (%u201Ccontagion...

What can we, as users of microdata, formally guarantee to the individuals (or firms) in our dataset, regarding their privacy? We retell a few stories, well-known in data-privacy circles, of failed anonymization attempts in publicly released datasets. We then provide a mostly informal...

Many discussions following the 2007/08 food price crisis have revolved around the magnitude of the negative impacts that it may have had on food security worldwide. Analysts have been asked to provide timely assessments, often based on partial data and information. The variety of opinions and...

This paper studies the pruned state-space system for higher-order approximations to the solutions of DSGE models. For second- and third-order approximations, we derive the statistical properties of this system and provide closed-form expressions for first and second unconditional moments and...

We compare the performance of maximum likelihood (ML) and simulated method of moments (SMM) estimation for dynamic discrete choice models. We construct and estimate a simplified dynamic structural model of education that captures some basic features of educational choices in the United States in...

We develop a sequential procedure to test the adequacy of jump-diffusion models for return distributions. We rely on intraday data and nonparametric volatility measures, along with a new jump detection technique and appropriate conditional moment tests, for assessing the import of jumps and...

This paper studies how stable over time are the so-called "structural parameters" of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models. To answer this question, we estimate a medium-scale DSGE model with real and nominal rigidities using U.S. data. In our model, we allow for parameter...