Is the U.S. bankrupt? Or to paraphrase the Oxford Dictionary, is the U.S. at the end of its resources, exhausted, stripped bear, destitute, bereft, wanting in property, or wrecked in consequence of failure to pay its creditors? Many would scoff at this notion. They’d point out that the country...

Suppose that a target function f0 : Rd ! R is monotonic, namely, weakly increasing, and an original estimate ^ f of the target function is available, which is not weakly increasing. Many common estimation methods used in statistics produce such estimates ^ f. We show that these estimates can...

We develop a model in which firms hire heterogeneous workers but must offer all workers insurance benefits under similar terms. In equilibrium, some firms offer free health insurance, some require an employee premium payment and some do not offer insurance. Making the employee contribution...

The most common approach to estimating conditional quantile curves is to fit a curve, typically linear, pointwise for each quantile. Linear functional forms, coupled with pointwise fitting, are used for a number of reasons including parsimony of the resulting approximations and good...

We consider Johansen’s (1988, 1991) cointegration tests when a Vector AutoRegressive (VAR) process of order k is used to approximate a more general linear process with an infinite VAR representation. In this case, and in particular when a moving average component is present, traditional...

We consider the power properties of the CUSUM and CUSUM of squares tests in the presence of a one-time change in the parameters of a linear regression model. A result due to Ploberger and Krämer (1990) is that the CUSUM of squares test has only trivial asymptotic local power in this case, while...

There is substantial international variation in gender pay gaps, from 25-30% in the US and the UK, to 10-20% in a number of central and northern EU countries, down to an average of 10% in southern EU. We argue that non-random selection of women into work across countries may explain part of such...

In summary, the most important lacuna of existing theoretical incentive-based literature is that it focuses on costs rather than the benefits of delegation. The latter are difficult to incorporate into traditional contract theory. Perhaps the most important benefit of delegation is the...