The Great Leap Forward (GLF) disaster, characterized by a collapse of grain output, and the associated famine in China between 1959 and 1961, can be attributed to a systemic failure in central planning. Encouraged by unrealistic expectations for agricultural productivity gains from...

Farm households in modern environments engage in multiple productive activities. In this paper we formulate and estimate a profit maximization model in which human capital enhances earnings through both activity-specific effects and across-activity factor allocation. Our purpose is to decompose...

This paper demonstrates two important results related to the estimation of a competing risks model under the proportional hazards assumption with grouped duration data, a model which has become the canonical model for the termination of mortgages with prepayment and default as two competing...

This paper proposes a semiparametric willingness to pay distribution and discusses several aspects of statistical inference with dichotomous choice contingent valuation data. We study likelihood-based estimation of the model parameters with and without controlling for unobserved heterogeneity,...

In this paper we present a a generalized self-consistent algorithm that estimates a survivor function with across-interval- censored data. This algorithm is an iterative procedure based on Turnbull's (1974) reallocation idea. At each step of the iteration, the procedure first reduces the...

This paper studies aspects of the broad class of log-concave probability distributions that arise in the economics of uncertainty and information. Useful properties of univariate log-concave distributions are proven without imposing differentiability of density functions. We also discuss...

In this paper, we study the initial-conditions problem, a complication associated with left-censored or interrupted spells in the econometric analysis of labor market transitions. In the presence of unobserved individual-specific heterogeneity, no consistent estimators have been previously...

The most popular survey method used in contingent valuations asks "open-ended" dichotomous choice questions. This method generates grouped or interval-censored data on respondents' willingness to pay. This paper specifies the willingness to pay distribution using the proportional hazard...