In this text, a newly appointed national secretary of education takes the reader on journey through time across the main dimensions of educational policy, observing its evolution over the last thirty years. Federative relations, financing, evaluation system, curricular parameters, and, of...

The number of Covid-19 cases is increasing dramatically worldwide, with several countries experiencing a second and worse wave. Therefore, the availability of reliable forecasts for the number of cases and deaths in the coming days is of fundamental importance. We propose a simple statistical...

This paper proposes a generalization of the class of realized semivariance and semicovariance measures introduced by Barndorff-Nielsen, Kinnebrock and Shephard (2010) and Bollerslev, Li, Patton and Quaedvlieg (2020a) to allow for a finer decomposition of realized (co)variances. The new "realized...

We adopt an artificial counterfactual approach to assess the impact of lockdowns on the short-run evolution of the number of cases and deaths in some US states. To do so, we explore the different timing in which US states adopted lockdown policies, and divide them among treated and control...

Factor and sparse models are two widely used methods to impose a low-dimensional structure in high dimension. They are seemingly mutually exclusive. In this paper, we propose a simple lifting method that combines the merits of these two models in a supervised learning methodology that allows to...

It is widely known that Google Trends has become one of the most popular free tools used by forecasters both in academics and in the private and public sectors. There are many papers, from several different fields, concluding that Google Trends improve forecasts' accuracy. However, what seems to...

We provide a new theory for nodewise regression when the residuals from a fitted factor model are used to apply our results to the analysis of maximum Sharpe ratio when the number of assets in a portfolio is larger than its time span. We introduce a new hybrid model where factor models are...

Price selection is a simple, model-free measure of selection in price setting and its contribu- tion to in ation dynamics. It exploits comovement between in ation and the level from which adjusting prices departed. Prices that increase from lower-than-usual levels tend to push in a- tion above...

Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) estimation of monetary policy rules produces potentially inconsistent estimates of policy parameters. The reason is that central banks react to variables, such as in ation and the output gap, which are endogenous to monetary policy shocks. Endogeneity implies a...

We study a unique dataset with comprehensive coverage of daily prices in large multi-product retailers in Israel. Retail stores synchronize price changes around occasional "peak" days when they reprice around 10% of their products. To assess aggregate implications of partial price...