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...

This paper exploits the discrete jump in alcohol consumption at the minimum legal drinking age (MLDA) in the United States and uses a regression discontinuity design to investigate the relationship between drinking and risky sexual behavior among young adults. Using confidential data from the...

In the United States, charitable contributions can be deducted from taxable income making the price of giving inversely related to the marginal tax rate. The existing literature documents that charitable giving is very responsive to tax subsidies, but often ignores the spillover effects of such...

How do charitable donors respond to the third party ratings that signal the quality of charities? I investigate this question using a novel data set from Charity Navigator which provides quality ratings for 5400 charities. Since Charity Navigator prominently displays a charity¡¯s star rating...

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 document trends in higher education costs and tuition over the past 50 years. To explain these trends, we develop and simulate a general equilibrium model with skill- and sector-biased technical change. We assume that higher education suffers from Baumol's (1967) service sector disease, in...

This paper studies the long-run aggregate and welfare effect of eliminating Social Security in a quantitative dynamic general equilibrium life-cycle model where parents and their chidren are linked by voluntary and accidental bequests. Social Security in this model with impure altruism has a...

I test the hypothesis that the mobility of scientific and technical personnel is a conduit for knowledge spillovers among innovative firms. Using a variant of the standard Tobin's Q equation, I show that firms who have access to large pools of externally created knowledge in their industrial and...