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作者：Amisano, Gianni; Geweke, John
作者单位：Federal Reserve System - USA; Federal Reserve System Board of Governors; University of Washington; University of Washington Seattle
摘要：We establish methods that improve the predictions of macroeconometric modelsdynamic factor models, dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models, and vector autoregressionsusing a quarterly U.S. data set. We measure prediction quality with one-step-ahead probability densities assigned in real time. Two steps lead to substantial improvements: (a) the use of full Bayesian predictive distributions rather than conditioning on the posterior mode for parameters and (b) the use of an equally weighted...
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作者：Park, Kyung H.
作者单位：Wellesley College
摘要：Numerous studies find that criminal court judges issue racially disparate sentences, but whether these patterns reflect tastes for discrimination remains unclear. An alternative explanation is statistical discrimination, which implies that judges rely on race to predict a felon's latent criminality in the absence of perfect information. This paper uses an empirical approach that distinguishes between taste-based and statistical discrimination. The intuition is that if the rank order of judicia...
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作者：Penney, Jeffrey
作者单位：Pontificia Universidad Javeriana
摘要：Research as to the size of the black-white test score gap often comes to contradictory conclusions. Recent literature has affirmed that the source of these contradictions and other controversies in education economics may be due to the fact that test scores contain only ordinal information. In this paper, I propose a normalization of test scores that is invariant to monotonic transformations. Under fairly weak assumptions, this metric has interval properties and thus solves the ordinality prob...
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作者：Frakes, Michael D.; Wasserman, Melissa F.
作者单位：Northwestern University; National Bureau of Economic Research; University of Illinois System; University of Illinois Chicago; University of Illinois Chicago Hospital
摘要：We explore how examiner behavior is altered by the time allocated for reviewing patent applications. Insufficient examination time may hamper examiner search and rejection efforts, leaving examiners more inclined to grant invalid applications. To test this prediction, we use application-level data to trace the behavior of individual examiners over the course of a series of promotions that carry with them reductions in examination time allocations. We find evidence demonstrating that such promo...
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作者：Aker, Jenny C.; Collier, Paul; Vicente, Pedro C.
作者单位：Tufts University; University of Oxford; Universidade Nova de Lisboa
摘要：African elections often reveal low levels of political accountability. We assess different forms of voter education during an election in Mozambique. Three interventions providing information to voters and calling for their participation were randomized: an information campaign using SMS, an SMS hotline for electoral misconduct, and the distribution of a free newspaper. To measure impact, we look at official electoral results, reports by electoral observers, and behavioral and survey data. We ...
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作者：Brainerd, Elizabeth
作者单位：Brandeis University; IZA Institute Labor Economics
摘要：How does a shock to sex ratios affect marriage markets and fertility? I use the drastic change in sex ratios caused by World War II to identify the effects of unbalanced sex ratios on Russian women. Using unique archival data, the results indicate that male scarcity led to lower rates of marriage and fertility, higher nonmarital births, and reduced bargaining power within marriage for women most affected by war deaths. The impact of sex ratio imbalance on marriage and family persisted for year...
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作者：Bhattacharya, Debopam; Kanaya, Shin; Stevens, Margaret
作者单位：University of Cambridge; Aarhus University; University of Oxford
摘要：Admission practices at high-profile universities are often criticized for undermining academic merit. Popular tests for detecting such biases suffer from omitted characteristic bias. We develop a bounds-based test to circumvent this problem. We assume that students who are better qualified on observableswould, on average, appear academically stronger to admission officers based on unobservables. This assumption reveals the sign of differences in admission standards across demographic groups th...
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作者：Byrne, David M.; Kovak, Brian K.; Michaels, Ryan
作者单位：Federal Reserve System - USA; Federal Reserve System Board of Governors; Carnegie Mellon University; National Bureau of Economic Research; Federal Reserve System - USA; Federal Reserve Bank - Philadelphia
摘要：Many markets exhibit price dispersion across suppliers of observationally identical goods. Statistical agencies typically assume this dispersion reflects unobserved quality, so standard price indexes do not incorporate price declines when buyers substitute toward lower-price suppliers. We show that long-run price differences across suppliers can be used to infer unobserved quality differences and propose an index that accommodates quality-adjusted price dispersion. Using transaction-level data...
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作者：Cornea-Madeira, Adriana
作者单位：University of York - UK
摘要：We derive the exact expression for the weights of the Hodrick-Prescott (HP) filter in a finite sample without making any assumptions about the statistical properties of the time series. We use the results to give insights into the properties of the HP filter and to build a fast algorithm with computational improvements by a factor of up to three times in samples typical in economics.
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作者：Jia, Ruixue; Nie, Huihua
作者单位：University of California System; University of California San Diego; Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR); Renmin University of China
摘要：This paper investigates how collusion between regulators and firms affects workplace safety using the case of China's coal mine deaths. We argue that decentralization makes collusion more likely and that its effect is strengthened if the transaction costs of collusion are lower. These hypotheses are tested by investigating the impact of decentralization contingent on regulators' characteristics. Exploring both decentralization and centralization reforms in the coal mine industry, we find that ...
