In 2005, the Indian Government launched a conditional cash-incentive program to encourage institutional delivery. This paper studies the effects of the program on neonatal mortality using district-level household survey data. We model mortality using survival analysis, paying special attention...

In 2005, the Indian Government launched a conditional cash-incentive program to encourage institutional delivery. This paper studies the effects of the program on neonatal mortality using district-level household survey data. We model mortality using survival analysis, paying special attention...

The specification of an optimizing model of the monetary transmission mechanism requires selecting a policy regime, commonly commitment or discretion. In this paper, we propose a new procedure for testing optimal monetary policy, relying on moment inequalities that nest commitment and discretion...

Modern trade agreements contain a large number of provisions in addition to tariff reductions, in areas as diverse as services trade, competition policy, trade-related investment measures, or public procurement. Existing research has struggled with overfitting and severe multicollinearity...

We propose various semiparametric estimators for nonlinear selection models, where slope and intercept can be separately identifed. When the selection equation satisfies a monotonic index restriction, we suggest a local polynomial estimator, using only observations for which the marginal...

In this paper, we investigate the relationship between bank reserves, deposits and loans using a time series approach. The empirical results show that free reserves cointegrate with both deposits and loans and the causal nexus runs from deposits (in the short run) to reserves and from deposits...

In this paper, we fill a gap in the financial econometrics literature, by developing a “jump test” for the null hypothesis that the probability of a jump is zero. The test is based on realized third moments, and uses observations over an increasing time span. The test offers an alternative...

In this paper, we investigate the association between international banks' operational losses and macro-financial variables, Governance Indicators and banks' specific covariates. We do so in a panel data setting, which includes both censoring (since losses below a given threshold are not...