In this paper we show that panel estimates of tenure specific sensitivity to the business cycle of wages is subject to serious pitfalls. Three canonical variates used in the literature - the minimum unemployment rate during a worker's time at the firm (min u), the unemployment rate at the start...

Analyses using aggregated data may bias inference. In this work we show how to avoid or at least reduce this bias when estimating quantile regressions using aggregated information. This is possible by considering the unconditional quantile regression recently introduced by Firpo et al (2009) and...

The issues of zero trade observations and the validity of the log linear transformation of the gravity equation have generated a number of debates in the literature with differing claims about the most suitable estimation technique. To produce unbiased and consistent estimates for policy making,...

Fixed effects (FE) in panel data models overlap each other and prohibit the identification of the impact of ''constant'' regressors. Think of regressors that are constant across countries in a country-time panel with time FE. The traditional approach is to drop some FE and constant regressors by...

We provide simple tests for selection on unobserved variables in the Vytlacil-Imbens-Angrist framework for Local Average Treatment Effects. The tests allow researchers not only to test for selection on either or both of the treated and untreated outcomes, but also to assess the magnitude of the...

The paper proposes a new algorithm for finding the confidence set of a collection of forecasts or prediction models. Existing numerical implementations for finding the confidence set use an elimination approach where one starts with the full collection of models and successively eliminates the...

The bootstrap is a popular and useful tool for estimating the asymptotic variance of complicated estimators. Ironically, the fact that the estimators are complicated can make the standard bootstrap computationally burdensome because it requires repeated re-calculation of the estimator. In...

I provide conditions under which the trimmed FDQML estimator, advanced by McCloskey (2010) in the context of fully parametric short-memory models, can be used to estimate the long-memory stochastic volatility model parameters in the presence of additive low-frequency contamination in log-squared...

This paper examines the sample proportions estimates in the presence of univariate missing categorical data. A database about smoking habits (2011 National Addiction Survey of Mexico) was used to create simulated yet realistic datasets at rates 5% and 15% of missingness, each for MCAR, MAR and...

The fundamental problem of external validity is not to generalize from one experiment, so much as to experimentally test generalizable theories. That is, theories that explain the systematic variation of causal effects across contexts. Here we show how the graphical language of causal diagrams...