“Matching” is a statistical technique used to evaluate the effect of a treatment by comparing the treated and non-treated units in an observational study. Matching provides an alternative to older estimation methods, such as ordinary least squares (OLS), which involves strong assumptions...

Inflation expectations are a key determinant of actual and future inflation and thus matter for the conduct of monetary policy. We study how firms form their inflation expectations using quarterly firm-level data from the Bank of Canada's Business Outlook Survey, spanning the 2001 to 2015...

Identification in a regression discontinuity (RD) design hinges on the discontinuity in the probability of treatment when a covariate (assignment variable) exceeds a known threshold. If the assignment variable is measured with error, however, the discontinuity in the first stage relationship...

Trygve Haavelmo's The Probability Approach in Econometrics (1944) has been widely regarded as the foundation document of modern econometrics. Nevertheless, its significance has been interpreted in widely different ways. Some modern economists regard it as a blueprint for a provocative, but...

Historians of the social sciences and historians of economics have come to agree that, in the United States, the 1940s transformation of economics from political economy to economic science was associated with economists' engagements with other disciplines—e.g. mathematics, statistics,...

This paper develops characterizations of identified sets of structures and structural features for complete and incomplete models involving continuous or discrete variables. Multiple values of unobserved variables can be associated with particular combinations of observed variables. This can...

The medical record is a repository of clinical data, which can greatly enhance the quality of health and healthcare analysis. Administrative data are collected for the purpose of billing and reimbursement, and are valued by health researchers because the data are routinely audited to maintain...

The New Keynesian Phillips Curve is at the center of two raging empirical debates. First, how can purely forward looking pricing account for the observed persistence in aggregate inflation. Second, price-setting responds to movements in marginal costs, which should therefore be the driving force...

This paper introduces a novel approach for dealing with the 'curse of dimensionality' in the case of large linear dynamic systems. Restrictions on the coefficients of an unrestricted VAR are proposed that are binding only in a limit as the number of endogenous variables tends to infinity. It is...

We study differences in the adjustment of aggregate real wages in the manufacturing sector over the business cycle across OECD countries, combining results from different data and dynamic methods. Summary measures of cyclicality show genuine cross-country heterogeneity even after controlling for...