School systems regularly use student assessments for accountability purposes. But, as highlighted by our conceptual model, different configurations of assessment usage generate performance-conducive incentives of different strengths for different stakeholders in different school environments. We...

We provide a framework for evaluating and improving multivariate density forecasts. Among other things, the multivariate framework lets us evaluate the adequacy of density forecasts involving cross-variable interactions, such as time-varying conditional correlations. We also provide conditions...

We examine the empirical evidence on the expectations hypothesis of the term structure of interest rates in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany using the Campbell-Shiller (1991) regressions and a vector-autoregressive" methodology. We argue that anomalies in the U.S. term...

Since 1968, the Survey of Professional Forecasters has asked respondents to provide a" complete probability distribution of expected future inflation. We evaluate the adequacy of" those density forecasts using the framework of Diebold, Gunther and Tay (1997). The analysis" reveals several...

We develop a procedure to rank-order countries and commodities using dis-aggregated American imports data. We find strong evidence that both countries and commodities can be ranked, consistent with the product cycle' hypothesis. Countries habitually begin to export goods to the United States...

We examine the generalizability of internally valid estimates of causal effects in a fixed population over time when that population is subject to aggregate shocks. This temporal external validity is shown to depend upon the distribution of the aggregate shocks and the interaction between these...

We propose a local measure of the relationship between parameter estimates and the moments of the data they depend on. Our measure can be computed at negligible cost even for complex structural models. We argue that reporting this measure can increase the transparency of structural estimates,...

Exporting firms often enter foreign markets that are similar to previous export destinations. We develop a dynamic model in which a firm's exports in a market may depend on how similar the market is to the firm's home country (gravity) and to its previous export destinations (extended gravity)....