A key concern in the design of education policies relates to the structure of incentives in accountability systems. This paper examines a school accountability program that provides financial support to low-performing schools but has no direct punishment scheme for recipients who do not exhibit...

Classical regression analysis uses partial coefficients to measure the influences of some variables (regressors) on another variable (regressand). However, a descriptive point of view shows that these coefficients are very bad measures of influence. Their interpretation as an average change of...

In this paper, the authors develop a new tool to improve the short-term forecasting of real GDP growth in the euro area and Japan. This new tool, which uses unrestricted mixed-data sampling (U-MIDAS) regressions, allows an evaluation of the usefulness of a wide range of indicators in predicting...

In this paper we analyze a multivariate non-stationary regression model empirically. With the knowledge about unconditional heteroscedasticty of financial returns, based on univariate studies and a congruent paradigm in Gürtler and Rauh (2009), we test for a time-varying covariance structure...

We investigate possible presence of time-varying risk premia in forward pound, yen,and Euro monthly exchange rates versus the US dollar 3 over the last two decades. We study this issue using regression techniques and separately using a signal plus noise model. Our models account for time-varying...

In this paper we propose a method for estimating and conducting inference on categorical effects of random variables that are characterize by more that two categories. We focus on a class of parametric asymptotically normal estimators in deriving the the properties which allows for inference on...