This paper uses microdata from the Labor Force and Household Surveys conducted in Afghanistan to show the wage premium differences for education between men and women, documenting a significantly larger premium for women. This sharp distinction is causal as demonstrated by analysis of the...

We develop a new methodology to estimate the impact of a financial transaction tax (FTT) on financial market outcomes. In our sequential trading model, there are price-elastic noise and informed traders. We estimate the model through maximum likelihood for a sample of sixty New York Stock...

A growing literature uses now widely available data on beliefs and expectations in the estimation of structural models. In this chapter, we review this literature, with an emphasis on models of individual and household behavior. We first show how expectations data have been used to relax strong...

The low-frequency movements of many economic variables play a prominent role in policy analysis and decision-making. We develop a robust estimation approach for these slow-moving trend processes, which is guided by a judicious choice of priors and is characterized by sparsity. We present some...

Modeling policy effects in the context of high-dimensional data requires a balanced consideration of omitted interaction bias and overfitting problems. This paper investigates the role of machine learning algorithms in stabilizing estimates and demonstrates the possible regularization bias...

A key stated objective of the Australian Plain Packaging Act 2011 is to influence smoking prevalence, in particular of minors. We use the Roy Morgan Single Source (Australia) data set on minors, (that is, Australians aged 14 to 17 years) over the time period January 2001 to December 2013 to...

We propose a new procedure for estimating a dynamic joint distribution of a group of assets in a sequential manner starting from univariate marginals, continuing with pairwise bivariate distributions, then with triplewise trivariate distributions, etc., until the joint distribution for the whole...

Technical inefficiency of production reflects a shortfall of output from the potential permitted by inputs. Allocative inefficiency reflects deviations from the optimal ratio of inputs. It is the absolute value of allocative inefficiency that is economically important. Adding allocative...

The traditional predictor of technical inefficiency proposed by Jondrow et al. (1982) is a conditional expectation. We study whether, and by how much, the predictor can be improved by using auxiliary information in the conditioning set. To do so, we use simulations to study two types of...

We systematically review studies of how unemployment benefits affect unemployment duration. Statistically significant findings are eleven times more likely to be published. Correcting for publication bias halves the average elasticity. Meta-analysis provides a principled way for sufficient...