SUMMARY Decision makers often observe point forecasts of the same variable computed, for instance, by commercial banks, IMF and the World Bank, but the econometric models used by such institutions are frequently unknown. This paper shows how to use the information available on point forecasts to...

SUMMARY While using financial incentives to increase fertility has become relatively common, the effects of such policies are difficult to assess. We propose an identification strategy that relies on the fact that the variation in wages induces variation in benefits and tax credits among...

SUMMARY We examine aggregate consumption growth predictability. We derive a dynamic consumption equation which encompasses relevant predictability factors: habit formation, intertemporal substitution, current income consumption and non‐separabilities between private consumption and both hours...

SUMMARY A new estimator is proposed for linear triangular systems, where identification results from the model errors following a bivariate and diagonal GARCH(1,1) process with potentially time‐varying error covariances. This estimator applies when traditional instruments are unavailable. I...

SUMMARY We introduce longitudinal factor analysis (LFA) to extract the common risk‐free (CRF) rate from a sample of sovereign bonds of countries in a monetary union. Since LFA exploits the typically very large longitudinal dimension of bond data, it performs better than traditional factor...

SUMMARY Reliable estimates of crime detection probabilities could help in designing better sanctions and improve our understanding of the efficiency of law enforcement. For cartels, we only have limited knowledge on the rate at which these illegal practices are discovered. In comparison to...

SUMMARY This paper proposes a moment‐matching method for approximating vector autoregressions by finite‐state Markov chains. The Markov chain is constructed by targeting the conditional moments of the underlying continuous process. The proposed method is more robust to the number of discrete...

SUMMARY This paper considers estimation of censored panel‐data models with individual‐specific slope heterogeneity. The slope heterogeneity may be random (random slopes model) or related to covariates (correlated random slopes model). Maximum likelihood and censored least‐absolute...