We study the U.S. origination-to-distribution mortgage financing market from the mid 1990s to the late 2000s. Mortgage loan brokers originated close to two thirds of the mortgage loans in this period. We examine whether stricter licensing requirements of loan brokers raise lending standards by...

Previous papers on testing for statistical discrimination require variables that employers do not observe directly, but are observed by researchers or data on employer-provided performance measures. This paper develops a test that does not rely on these specific variables. The proposed test can...

This paper shows that for five small commodity-exporting countries that have adopted inflation targeting monetary policies, world commodity price aggregates have predictive power for their CPI and PPI inflation, particularly once possible structural breaks are taken into account. This conclusion...

The literature on Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) determinants is remarkably diverse in terms of competing theories and empirical results. We utilize Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA) to resolve the model uncertainty that surrounds the validity of the competing FDI theories. Since the structure of...

We examine the impact of a stylized pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) Social Security program in an economy of overlapping generations with equilibrium growth. We adopt realistic mortality and other demographic assumptions and allow for the presence or absence of full life annuities. In all cases we find...

Count models often best describe the nature of data in health economics, but the presence of fixed effects with excess zeros and overdispersion strictly limits the choice of estimation methods. This paper presents a quasi-conditional likelihood method to consistently estimate models with excess...

This paper takes a new approach to testing whether employer learning is public or private. We show that public and private learning schemes make two distinct predictions about the curvature of wage growth paths when there is a job change, because the amount of information transferred to a new...