In May 2004 a conference was held at Cornell University entitled “75 Years of Development Research.”. Apart from the usual array of theoretical and empirical papers on development, a number of panels took stock of the state of development economics and discussed a range of methodological...

The paper examines whether patterns of service level spending in capitated managed care plans differ from those in traditional non-managed care health plans. We apply the service selection model of Ellis and McGuire (2007) to recent, highly disaggregated commercial insurance data from Medstat...

Productivity dispersion across firms is large and persistent, and worker reallocation among firms is an important source of productivity growth. The purpose of the paper is to estimate the structure of an equilibrium model of growth through innovation. The model is a modified version of the...

This paper investigates the roots of international, domestic, and separatist terrorism using a new, extensive, multi-country panel data set obtained from MIPT (Memorial Institute of Prevention of Terrorism). I augment the MIPT data by recording the target country and the terrorist's country of...

Between 1997 and 2000 the Australian government introduced three policy reforms that aimed to increase private health insurance coverage and reduce public hospital demand. The first provided income-based tax incentives; the second gave an across-the-board 30% premium subsidy; and the third...

We consider the problem of estimating and testing for multiple breaks in a single equation framework with regressors that are endogenous, i.e., correlated with the errors. First, we show based on standard assumptions about the regressors, instruments and errors that the second stage regression...

Recent research seeking to explain the strong cyclicality of US unemployment emphasizes the role of wage rigidity. This paper proposes a micro-founded model of wage rigidity – an equilibrium business cycle model of job search, where risk neutral firms post optimal long-term contracts to...

In this paper we develop procedures to make inference in regression models about how potential policy interventions affect the entire distribution of an outcome variable of interest. These policy interventions consist of counterfactual changes in the distribution of covariates related to the...

Elliott and Müller (2006) considered the problem of testing for general types of parameter variations, including infrequent breaks. They developed a framework that yields optimal tests, in the sense that they nearly attain some local Gaussian power envelop. The main ingredient in their setup is...

Using plant-level data from Chile and the U.S., we show that investment spikes are highly pro-cyclical, so much so that changes in the number of establishments undergoing investment spikes (the “extensive margin”) account for the bulk of variation in aggregate investment. The number of...