A core mechanism of unified growth theory is that accelerating technological progress induces mass education and, through interaction with child quantity-quality substitution, a decline in fertility. Using unique new data for 21 OECD countries over the period 1750-2000, we test, for the first...

We use data from a large US life expectancy provider to test for asymmetric information in the secondary life insurance-or life settlements-market. We compare realized lifetimes for a subsample of settled policies relative to all (settled and nonsettled) policies, and find a positive...

This paper shows that the consumption-based capital asset pricing model (C-CAPM) with low-probability disaster risk rationalizes pricing errors. We find that implausible estimates of risk aversion and time preference are not puzzling if market participants expect a future catastrophic change in...

This paper introduces a nonlinear certainty-equivalent approximation method for dynamic stochastic problems. We first introduce a novel, stable, and efficient method for computing the decision rules in deterministic dynamic economic problems. We use the results as nonlinear and global...

We introduce a computational technique- precomputation of integrals - that makes it possible to construct conditional expectation functions in dynamic stochastic models in the initial stage of a solution procedure. This technique is very general: it works for a broad class of approximating...

With capital-skill complementarity, the secular decline in the price of capital equipment due to equipment-specific technological progress (ESTP) keeps pushing up the demand for skilled relative to unskilled labor and raising the skill premium. This paper quantitatively characterizes the...

We introduce a novel simulated certainty equivalent approximation (SCEQ) method for solving dynamic stochastic problems. Our examples show that SCEQ can quickly solve high-dimensional finite- or infinite-horizon, stationary or non- stationary dynamic stochastic problems with hundreds of state...

A divide and conquer algorithm for exploiting policy function monotonicity is proposed and analyzed. To solve a discrete problem with n states and n choices, the algorithm requires at most nlog2(n)+5n objective function evaluations. In contrast, existing methods for nonconcave problems require...

This paper develops and estimates a model of college basketball teams' search for scoring opportunities, to provide a benchmark of the winning margin distributions that should arise if teams' only goal is to win. I estimate the model's structural parameters using first-half play-by-play data...

Morton and Wecker (1977) stated that the value iteration algorithm solves a dynamic program's policy function faster than its value function when the limiting Markov chain is ergodic. I show that their proof is incomplete, and provide a new proof of this classic result. I use this result to...