Economists disagree about the factors driving the substantial increase in residual wage inequality in the U.S. over the past few decades. We identify and estimate a general model of log wage residuals that incorporates: (i) changing returns to unobserved skills, (ii) a changing distribution of...

We investigate state-dependent effects of fiscal multipliers and allow for endogenous sample splitting to determine whether the US economy is in a slack state. When the endogenized slack state is estimated as the period of the unemployment rate higher than about 12 percent, the estimated...

In this paper, we estimate the time-varying COVID-19 contact rate of a Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) model. Our measurement of the contact rate is constructed using data on actively infected, recovered and deceased cases. We propose a new trend filtering method that is a variant of the...