Self-assessed health status conditioned by several objective measures of health and socio-demographic characteristics are used to measure health inequality. We compare the quality of health and health inequality among different racial/ethnic groups as well as across 17 regions in New York State....

Using self-assessed health status together with several indicators of individual morbidity and socio-demographic characteristics, we study the quality of health and income related health disparity in five racial/ethnic groups as well as across 17 geographic areas of New York State. The American...

While the yield spread has long been recognized as a good predictor of recessions, it seems to have been largely overlooked by professional forecasters. We examine this puzzle, established by Rudebusch and Williams (2009), in a data-rich environment including not just the yield spread but many...

We propose serial correlation robust asymptotic confidence bands for the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves estimated by quasi-maximum likelihood in the binormal model. Our simulation experiments confirm that this new method performs fairly well in finite samples. The conventional...

We propose a generalized ordered response model that nests the popular Carlson-Parkin (CP) method to quantify household in flation expectations while explicitly control for cross-sectional heterogeneity in the threshold parameters and the variance. By matching qualitative and quantitative data...

We study the role of the well-known monthly diffusion indices produced by the Institute or Supply Management in nowcasting current quarter US GDP growth. We investigate their marginal impact on these nowcasts when large unbalanced (jagged edge) macroeconomic data sets are used in real time to...

We develop a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm for estimating nested logit models in a Bayesian framework. Appropriate "heating target" and reparameterization techniques are adopted for fast mixing. For illustrative purposes, we have implemented the algorithm on two real-life examples...

This paper examines the determinants of inflation forecast uncertainty using a panel of density forecasts from the Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF). Based on a dynamic heterogeneous panel data model, we find that the persistence in forecast uncertainty is much less than what the...