In communities highly dependent on rain fed agriculture for their livelihoods, the common occurrence of climatic shocks such as droughts can lower the opportunity cost of having children, and raise fertility. Using longitudinal household data from Madagascar, we estimate the causal effect of...

We propose a Kronecker product model for correlation or covariance matrices in thelarge dimensional case. The number of parameters of the model increases logarithmicallywith the dimension of the matrix. We propose a minimum distance (MD) estimator basedon a log-linear property of the model, as...

There is no scientific consensus on the fundamental question whether the probability distribution of the human life span has a finite endpoint or not and, if so, whether this upper limit changes over time. Our study uses a unique dataset of the ages at death - in days - of all (about 285,000)...

This paper develops an innovative way of estimating a functional-coefficient spatial autoregressive panel data model with unobserved individual effects which can accommodate (multiple) time-invariant regressors in the model with a large number of cross-sectional units and a fixed number of time...

A widely relied upon but a formally untested consideration is the issue of stability in factors underlying the term structure of interest rates. In testing for stability, practitioners as well as academics have employed ad-hoc techniques such as splitting the sample into a few sub-periods and...

We propose a smoothed least squares estimator of the parameters of a threshold regression model. Our model generalizes that considered in Hansen (2000) to allow the thresholding to depend on a linear index of observed regressors, thus allowing discrete variables to enter. We also do not assume...

We propose non-nested hypotheses tests for conditional moment restriction models based on the method of generalized empirical likelihood (GEL). By utilizing the implied GEL probabilities from a sequence of unconditional moment restrictions that contains equivalent information of the conditional...

We propose a simple and flexible framework that allows for a comprehensive analysis of tail interdependence in high dimensions. We use co-exceedances to capture the structure of the dependence in the tails and, relying on the concept of multi-information, define the coefficient of tail...

We estimate the increase in earnings from a law degree relative to a bachelor's degree for graduates who majored in different fields in college. Students with humanities and social sciences majors comprise approximately 47 percent of law degree holders compared to 23 percent of terminal...

While permutation tests and bootstraps have very wide-ranging application, both share a common potential drawback: as data-intensive resampling methods, both can be runtime prohibitive when applied to large or even medium-sized data samples drawn from large datasets. The data explosion over the...