Two of the features that distinguish Social Security and many other state mandated pension plans around the world are that (i) a minimum level of savings for retirement is imposed on most citizens and (ii) individuals cannot decide how their contributions are invested. Here, a rationale for...

Statistics are developed to test for the presence of an asymptotic discontinuity (or infinite density or peakedness) in a probability density at the median. The approach makes use of work by Knight (1998) on L1 estimation asymptotics in conjunction with non-parametric kernel density estimation...

In this paper, we study functional regression and its properties in testing the hypothesis of a constant zero mean function or an unknown constant non-zero mean function. As we show, the associated Wald test statistics have standard chi-square limiting null distributions, standard non-central...

This paper proposes an endogenous growth model where human capital is the engine of growth and can be transferred across countries via costly foreign education. Importing advanced knowledge by students abroad can improve a developing country¡¯s chance of catching up with a developed host...

We investigate the mechanism that provides the optimal decision rule for two agents making joint decisions. It is shown that, a special rectangular mechanism with two sided screening, elicit correct information when agents?preferences are private information. Such mechanism is presented as a...

The paper examines the possibilities to improve efficiency in Internet pricing by introducing pre-purchase contract. One can regard pre-purchase market as a device for providing guaranteed services and as an alternative to smart market that can implement expected capacity pricing in an efficient...

It has long been recognized that worker wages and possibly productivity are higher in large firms. Moreover, at least since Schumpeter (1942) economists have been interested in the relative efficiency of large firms in the research and development enterprise. This paper uses longitudinal...

Using an endogenous-growth, overlapping-generations framework where human capital is the engine of growth, we derive propositions concerning the evolution of income and fertility distributions and their interdependencies over three phases of economic development. In our model, heterogeneous...

We introduce worker differences in labor supply, reecting differences in skills and assets, into a model of separations, matching, and unemployment over the business cycle. Separating from employment when unemployment duration is long is particularly costly for workers with high labor supply....

The main difficulty in treatment effect analysis with matching is accounting for unobserved differences (i.e., selection problem) between the treatment and control groups, because matching assumes no such differences. The traditional way to tackle the difficulty has been ¡®control function¡¯...