This paper constructs a continuous and consistent measure of intergenerational mobility in the United States between 1850 and 1930 by linking individuals with the same first name across pairs of decennial Censuses. One of the advantages of this methodology is that it allows to calculate...

Governments are known for procrastinating when it comes to resolving painful policy problems. Whatever the political motives for waiting to decide, procrastination distorts economic decisions relative to what would arise with early policy resolution. In so doing, it engenders excess burden. This...

The effect of extending the duration of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits on nonem- ployment duration is a hotly debated question. The vast majority of the literature (e.g., Katz and Meyer 1990, Schmieder, von Wachter, and Bender 2012) [henceforth SVB]) analyzes the eect of extensions in UI...

This paper examines how violence influences the political preferences of an aggrieved constituency that is purportedly represented by militant factions. Using longitudinal public opinion poll micro data of the Palestinian population linked to data on fatalities from the Second Intifada, we find...

We propose estimators of the memory parameter of a time series that are robust to a wide variety of random level shift processes, deterministic level shifts and de- terministic time trends. The estimators are simple trimmed versions of the popular log-periodogram regression estimator that employ...

During the 1850s, land in U.S. farms increased by more than a third—100 million acres—and almost 50 million acres, an area almost equal to that of the states of Indiana and Ohio combined, were converted from their raw, natural state into productive farmland. The time and expense of...

Most new consumer durable goods experience rapid declines in prices and improvements in qual- ity, suggesting the importance of modeling dynamics. This paper estimates a dynamic model of consumer preferences for new durable goods with persistent heterogeneous consumer tastes, rational...

We study the finite sample properties of tests for structural changes in the trend function of a time series that do not require knowledge of the degree of persistence in the noise component. The tests of interest are the quasi-feasible generalized least squares procedure by Perron and Yabu...

I develop a general equilibrium model of saving behavior in which the quality of nancial decisions is endogenously determined by the incentives to exert effort in learning about financial opportunities. The model generates predictions for asset holdings, asset market participation and returns...