1971-2009. Financial shocks are defined as unexpected changes of a financial conditions index (FCI), recently developed by Hatzius et al. (2010), for the US. We use a time-varying factor-augmented VAR to model the FCI jointly with a large set of macroeconomic, financial and trade variables for...

Die vorliegende Arbeit untersucht, wie sich Angebots-, Nachfrage- und geldpolitische Schocks aus den Vereinigten Staaten auf Deutschland übertragen. Dabei wird ein so genanntes factor-augmented vector autoregressive model (FAVAR) auf einen neu zusammengestellten Datensatz mit mehr als 200...

Instrumental variables estimates of the effect of military service on subsequent civilian earnings either omit schooling or treat it as exogenous. In a more general setting that also allows for the treatment of schooling as endogenous, we estimate the veteran effect for men who were born between...

This paper studies peer effects on student achievement among first graders randomly assigned to classrooms in Tennessee's Project STAR. The analysis uses previously unexploited pre-assignment achievement measures available for 60 percent of students. Data are not missing at random, making...

We examine the value of terroir, which refers to the special characteristics of a place that impart unique qualities to the wine produced. We do this by conducting a hedonic analysis of vineyard sales in the Willamette Valley of Oregon to ascertain whether site attributes, such as slope, aspect,...

The five-factor personality model is used to calculate personality scores of U.S. presidential candidates, based on how voters rated the candidates on 69 trait adjectives. These scores are then used to predict the election results from 1972 to 2012. In ten of the eleven elections, the candidate...

We present a model of household saving toward a mortgage loan under an exogenous down payment requirement and preference for owning over renting. Our model explains a set of empirical observations such as the dual effect in the form of some households, in response to higher down payments,...

This letter evaluates two types of forecasts from probit models that use the slope of the yield curve (“term spread”) to forecast NBER recessions, using an evaluation toolkit common in statistics and meteorology. The probit models provide excellent non-probabilistic yes/no predictions of...

In this paper we explore the long term movement in the housing prices in select American cities. Using the monthly S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices, we look at the stability of housing prices in 14 selected large American cities. We undertake the ADF (GLS) unit root test for the index in each...