This paper studies in some detail a class of high frequency based volatility (HEAVY) models.  These models are direct models of daily asset return volatility based on realized measures constructed from high frequency data.  Our analysis identifies that the models have momentum and mean...

Specific functional forms are often used in economic models of distributions; goodness-of-fit measures are used to assess whether a functional form is appropriate in the light of real-world data.  Standard approaches use a distance criterion based on the EDF, an aggregation of differences in...

In the context of a "beauty contest" coordination game (in which pay-offs depend on the proximity of actions to an unobserved state variable and to the average action) players choose how much costly attention to pay to various informative signals; they endogenously select information sources and...

A key ingredient of many particle filters is the use of the sampling importance resampling algorithm (SIR), which transforms a sample of weighted draws from a prior distribution into equally weighted draws from a posterior distribution.  We give a novel analysis of the SIR algorithm and analyse...

We defend the forecasting performance of the FOMC from the recent criticism of Christina and David Romer.  Our argument is that the FOMC forecasts a worst-case scenario that it uses to design decisions that will work well enough (are robust) despite possible misspecification of its model. ...

An observer makes a number of observations of an industry producing a homogeneous good.  Each observation consists of the market price, the output of individual firms and perhaps information on each firm's production cost.  We provide various tests (typically, linear programs) with which the...

We develop a model of endogenous skill-biased technical change in developing countries.  The model reconciles wildly dispersed existing estimates of the elasticity of substitution between more and less educated workers.  It also produces an estimating equation for the elasticity, which allow...

This paper discusses the place of oligopoly in international trade theory, and argues that it is unsatisfactory to ignore firms altogether, as in perfectly competitive models, or to view large firms as more productive clones of small ones, as in monopolistically competitive models.  Doing...

For some observers, the dramatic growth of the services sector in India reflects rapid strides made by educated professionals.  Some others see it as the expansion of an employer of last resort.  Given this heterogeneity, the object of the paper is to analyze the nature of employment being...

A specially designed household survey for rural China is used to analyse the determinants of aspirations for income, proxied by reported minimum income need, and the determinants of subjective well-being, both satisfaction with life and satisfaction with income.  It is found that aspiration...