This paper provides evidence on the degree of persistence of one of the key components of the CAPM, namely the market risk premium, as well as its volatility. The analysis applies fractional integration methods to data for the US, Germany and Japan, and for robustness purposes considers...

We propose new methods for estimating the bid-ask spread from observed transaction prices alone. Our methods are based on the empirical characteristic function instead of the sample autocovariance function like the method of Roll (1984). As in Roll (1984), we have a closed form expression for...

We estimate the effect of class size on student performance in 18 countries, combining school fixed effects and instrumental variables to identify random class-size variation between two adjacent grades within individual schools. Conventional estimates of class-size effects are shown to be...