Over the course of the 20th century American wages increased by a factor of about 100, while the wages of professional baseball players increased by a factor of 450, but that increase was neither smooth nor consistent. We use a unique and expansive dataset of salaries and performance variables...

The effect of income inequality on savings and consumption has remained an open empirical issue despite several decades of research. Results obtained in this study indicate that income inequality and private consumption are both I(1) nonstationary variables that are cointegrated, and inequality...

We examine cross-region capital mobility in China and track how the degree of mobility has changed over time. The effects of fiscal and redistributive activities of different levels of government in China on private capital mobility are taken into account. Our results indicate that there was a...

Econometrics is the area of statistics concerned in analyzing economic data, for both economic and business applications. This document, introduces the intermediate concepts of this area, for students already familiarized with basic econometric theory. In particular, topics concerning...

We develop a recursion for hidden Markov model of any order h, which allows us to obtain the posterior distribution of the latent state at every occasion, given the previous h states and the observed data. With respect to the well-known Baum-Welch recursions, the proposed recursion has the...

In this paper we suggest panel data unit root tests which allow for a structural breaks in the individual effects or linear trends of panel data models. This is done under the assumption that the disturbance terms of the panel are heterogeneous and serially correlated. The limiting distributions...

This paper extends the cross sectionally augmented panel unit root test proposed byPesaran (2007) to the case of a multifactor error structure. The basic idea is to exploitinformation regarding the unobserved factors that are shared by other time series in additionto the variable under...

The paper analyzes the impact of physicians' altruism and motivation on the outcomes of pay-for-performance schemes in healthcare, where a fixed price contract on quantity is supplemented with a relative performance contract on quality. Our theoretical model forecasts crowding out of most...

Do technological improvements mitigate the potential damages from extreme weather events? We address this question using oil production and hurricane data from the Gulf of Mexico. We show that hurricane activity lowers well production and that stronger storms have larger impacts that persist for...