Analyses of the effects of election outcomes on the economy have been hampered by the problem that economic outcomes also influence elections. We sidestep these problems by analyzing movements in economic indicators caused by clearly exogenous changes in expectations about the likely winner...

We propose a nonparametric likelihood ratio testing procedure for choosing between a parametric (likelihood) model and a moment condition model when both models could be misspecified. Our procedure is based on comparing the Kullback–Leibler Information Criterion (KLIC) between the parametric...

A basic assumption of economics is that consumers choose what they want. However, many consumers find it difficult to stop overeating, overspending, smoking, procrastinating, etc, even though they want to. In reality, consumers have temptation and it is psychologically costly to exercise...

Interest in behavioral economics has grown in recent years, stimulated largely by accumulating evidence that the standard model of consumer decision making provides an inadequate, positive description of human behavior. Behavioral models are increasingly finding their way into policy evaluation,...

The economic equivalent value of deaths and injuries in the 1994 Northridge earthquake has not previously been calculated, although number of injuries by category of treatment has. Using dollar-equivalent values for injuries accepted and used by the U.S. government for evaluating the...

This paper is concerned with nonlinear filtering of the coefficients in asset price models with stochastic volatility. More specifically, we assume that the asset price process S=(St)t≥0 is given by dSt=m(θt)St dt+v(θt)St dBt, where B=(Bt)t≥0 is a Brownian motion, v is a positive...

Exploiting a rich panel data set on anti-ulcer drug prescriptions, we measure the effects of uncertainty and learning in the demand for pharmaceutical drugs. We estimate a dynamic matching model of demand under uncertainty in which patients learn from prescription experience about the...

The search for unifying properties of complex networks is popular, challenging, and important. For modeling approaches that focus on robustness and fragility as unifying concepts, the Internet is an especially attractive case study, mainly because its applications are ubiquitous and pervasive,...

Procedures are presented that allow the empiricist to estimate and test asset pricing models on limited-liability securities without the assumption that the historical payoff distribution provides a consistent estimate of the market's prior beliefs. The procedures effectively filter return data...

We examine seismic risk from the commercial real estate investor's viewpoint. We present a methodology to estimate the uncertain net asset value (NAV) of an investment opportunity considering market risk and seismic risk. For seismic risk, we employ a performance-based earthquake engineering...