This paper develops the approximate nite-sample bias of the ordinary least squares or quasi maximum likelihood estimator of the mean reversion parameter in continuous-time Levy processes. For the special case of Gaussian processes, our results reduce to those of Tang and Chen (2009) (when the...

Large and persistent differences in corruption across comparable countries often are loosely attributed to unarticulated “cultural factors.” Such attributions may indicate a lack of firmer perspectives from social sciences. An even more challenging research issue is the presence of such...

We consider a collective model of a household in which earn member has a utility function satisfying the weak separability condition. We show that the separability at the individual level carries over to the household level and that the allocation of private goods in any Pareto-efficient...

The asymptotic distributions of the least squares estimator of the mean reversion parameter (κ) are developed in a general class of diffusion models under three sampling schemes, namely, longspan, in-fill and the combination of long-span and in-fill. The models have an affine structure in the...

This paper studies nepotism by government officials in an authoritarian regime. We collect a unique dataset of political promotions of officials in Vietnam and estimate their impact on public infrastructure in their hometowns. We find strong positive effects on several outcomes, some with lags,...

Recent literature has proposed two alternative types of financial frictions, i.e., limited commitment and incomplete markets, to explain the patterns of international capital flows between developed and developing countries observed in the past two decades. This paper integrates both types of...

We examine several hypotheses regarding the determinants and implications of political protest, motivated by the wave of popular uprisings in Arab countries starting in late 2010. We draw attention to one of the most fundamental correlates of political activity identied in the literature, namely...

Recent literature has proposed two alternative types of financial frictions, i.e., limited commitment and incomplete markets, to explain the patterns of international capital flows between developed and developing countries observed in the past two decades. This paper integrates both types of...

A new posterior odds analysis is proposed to test for a unit root in volatility dynamics in the context of stochastic volatility models. Our analysis extends the Bayesian unit root test of So and Li (1999, Journal of Business and Economic Statistics) in the two important ways. First, a...

Right-tailed unit root tests have proved promising for detecting exuberance in economic and financial activities. Like left-tailed tests, the limit theory and test performance are sensitive to the null hypothesis and the model specification used in parameter estimation. This paper aims to...