We propose that the borrower’s ability to pay through a mortgage is a long-run house price fundamental and …find convincing evidence by means of cointegration tests, granger causality, and an elasticity of house prices with respect to ability to pay close to one. Ability to pay incorporates...

We develop a new Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA)-based methodology for measuring the efficiency of Decision Making Units (DMUs) characterized by multiple inputs and multiple outputs. The distinguishing feature of our method is that it explicitly includes information about output-specific inputs...

This paper investigates the evolution of global well-being inequality between 1980 and 2010 based on three dimensions: income, health and education. The inequality of each of these dimensions shows a different pattern over time. To make an overall assessment of the evolution of well-being...

We present a revealed preference analysis of the testable implications of the Nash bargaining solution. Our specific focus is on a two-player game involving consumption decisions. We consider a setting in which the empirical analyst has information on both the threat points bundles and the...

This paper develops an efficiency theory of contingent trade policies. We model the competition for a domestic market between one domestic and one foreign firm as a pricing game under incomplete information about production costs. The cost distributions are asymmetric because the foreign firm...

Many countries provide extra resources to schools serving disadvantaged pupils. We exploit a discontinuity in the assignment of such personnel subsidies in Flanders to estimate the impact on cognitive outcomes via a regression discontinuity (RD) design. Because bias can be substantial in RD...

This paper argues that important insights into the business cycle can be obtained by exploring the micro-structure of macroeconomic fluctuations. We fit firm-level growth data with the Asymmetric Exponential Power density, which accounts for asymmetric dispersion and kurtosis on either side of...

We address how the value of risky options should be assessed in the case where the sum of the probability-weighted payoffs is not absolutely convergent and thus dependent on the order in which the terms are summed (e.g., as in the Pasadena Paradox). We develop and partially defend a proposal...