This document describes the data collection and use of data for the computation of rankings within RePEc (Research Papers in Economics). This encompasses the determination of impact factors for journals and working paper series, as well as the ranking of authors, institutions, and geographic...

We compare a uniform voucher regime against the status quo mix of public and private education, focusing on the distribution of welfare gains and losses across house-holds by income. We argue that the topping-up option available under uniform vouchers is not sufficiently valuable for the poorer...

We study the optimal auditing of a taxpayer’s income in a dynamic principal-agent model of hidden income. Taxpayers in our model initially have low income and stochastically transit to high income that is an absorbing state. A low-income taxpayer who transits to high income can underreport his...

In this paper, we propose a new family of multivariate loss functions that can be used to test the rationality of vector forecasts without assuming independence across variables. When only one variable is of interest, the loss function reduces to the flexible asymmetric family proposed by...

In his classic work on the economics of fertility, Becker (1960) suggests that children are likely “normal.” We examine this contention. Our first step is documenting an empirical regularity about the cross section of non-Hispanic white married couples in the U.S.: When we restrict...

Using formal statistical tests, we detect (i) significant volatility increases for various types of capital flows for a period of changes in business cycle comovement among the G7 countries, and (ii) mixed evidence of changes in covariances and correlations with a set of macroeconomic variables

In early 2004, the U.S. Government initiated the Medicare Discount Drug Card Program, which created a market for drug cards that allowed their subscribers to obtain discounts on their prescription drug purchases. Pharmacy-level prices for several drugs were posted on the program website weekly...

This paper constructs an endogenous growth model driven by self-fulfilling expectation shocks to explain the stylized fact that the average growth rate of GDP is related negatively to volatility and positively to capacity utilization. The implied welfare gain from further stabilizing the U.S....

The paper uses a Hecksher-Ohlin-Samuelson type general equilibrium framework to consider the incidence of an outsourcing tax on an economy in which the production of a specific intermediate input has been fragmented and outsourced. If the outsourced sector provides a non-traded input, the...

This paper presents empirical evidence on the efficacy of forecast averaging using the ALFRED real-time database. We consider averages taken over a variety of different bivariate VAR models that are distinguished from one another based upon at least one of the following: which variables are used...