Important features of certain economic models may be revealed by studying positive eigenfunctions of appropriately chosen linear operators. Examples include long-run risk-return relationships in dynamic asset pricing models and components of marginal utility in external habit formation models....

We introduce econometric methods to perform estimation and inference on the permanent and transitory components of the stochastic discount factor (SDF) in dynamic Markov environments. The approach is nonparametric in that it does not impose parametric restrictions on the law of motion of the...

A two-step estimation method of stochastic volatility models is proposed. In the first step, we nonparametrically estimate the (unobserved) instantaneous volatility process. In the second step, standard estimation methods for fully observed diffusion processes are employed, but with the...

We study the problem of nonparametric regression when the regressor is endogenous, which is an important nonparametric instrumental variables (NPIV) regression in econometrics and a difficult ill-posed inverse problem with unknown operator in statistics. We first establish a general upper bound...

We investigate a model in which we connect slowly time varying unconditional long-run volatility with short-run conditional volatility whose representation is given as a semi-strong GARCH (1,1) process with heavy tailed errors. We focus on robust estimation of both long-run and short-run...

Individual players in a simultaneous equation binary choice model act differently in different environments in ways that are frequently not captured by observables and a simple additive random error. This paper proposes a random coefficient specification to capture this type of heterogeneity in...

The generalized method of moments estimator may be substantially biased in finite samples, especially so when there are large numbers of unconditional moment conditions. This paper develops a class of first order equivalent semi-parametric efficient estimators and tests for conditional moment...

In this paper, the regression discontinuity design (RDD) is generalized to account for differences in observed covariates X in a fully nonparametric way. It is shown that the treatment effect can be estimated at the rate for one-dimensional nonparametric regression irrespective of the dimension...

The principal purpose of this paper is to adapt to the conditional moment context the GEL unconditional moment methods described in Smith(1997, 2001) and Newey and Smith(2004). In particular we develop GEL estimators which achieve the semiparametric efficiency lower bound. The requisite GEL...

Consider an observed binary regressor D and an unobserved binary variable D*, both of which affect some other variable Y . This paper considers nonparametric identification and estimation of the effect of D on Y , conditioning on D* = 0. For example, suppose Y is a person's wage, the unobserved...