This paper summarizes our recent research on evaluating the distributional consequences of social programs. This research advances the economic policy evaluation literature beyond estimating assorted mean impacts to estimate distributions of outcomes generated by different policies and determine...

This paper examines the performance of the JTPA performance system, a widely emulated model for inducing efficiency in government organizations. We present a model of how performance incentives may distort bureaucratic decisions. We define cream skimming within the model. Two major empirical...

Exchange market pressure (EMP) measures the pressure on a currencyto depreciate. It adds to the actual depreciation a weightedcombination of policy instruments used to ward off depreciation,such as interest rates and foreign exchange interventions, where theweights are their effectiveness. The...

Exchange market pressure (EMP) measures the pressure on a currency to depreciate. It adds to the actual depreciation a weighted combination of policy instruments used to ward off depreciation, such as interest rates and foreign exchange interventions, where the weights are their effectiveness....

This paper has been accepted for publication in the 'Review of Economics and Statistics'.We propose a dynamic factor model for mixed-measurement and mixed-frequency panel data. In this framework time series observations may come from a range of families of parametric distributions, may be...

We introduce a new efficient importance sampler for nonlinear non-Gaussian state space models. We propose a general and efficient likelihood evaluation method for this class of models via the combination of numerical and Monte Carlo integration methods. Our methodology explores the idea that...

We propose a new model for dynamic volatilities and correlations of skewed and heavy-tailed data. Our model endows the Generalized Hyperbolic distribution with time-varying parameters driven by the score of the observation density function. The key novelty in our approach is the fact that the...

We study the performance of alternative methods for calculating in-sample confidence and out of-sample forecast bands for time-varying parameters. The in-sample bands reflect parameter uncertainty only. The out-of-sample bands reflect both parameter uncertainty and innovation uncertainty. The...

This paper investigates the tax responsiveness of multinational firms’ investment decisions in foreign countries, distinguishing firms that are able to avoid taxes (avoiders) from those that are not (non-avoiders). From a theoretical point of view, the tax responsiveness of firms crucially...