The analysis of highly structured data requires models with unobserved components (random effects) able to adequately account for the patterns of variances and correlations. The specification of the unobserved components is a key and challenging task. In this paper, we first review the...

Mortality risk varies geographically, especially in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region, where economic development is quite diverse. We present a newly-collected dataset on aggregate population mortality from eleven countries in APAC, which we rank based on their economic development. Using lead-lag...

Prior empirical auditing research has typically used linear regression analysis to analyze auditor relationships. However, because audit firms, audit partners, and audit clients are nested and clustered, data on them lacks independence, and violates the assumptions necessary for valid tests...

Improving school quality with limited resources is a key issue of policy. It has been suggested that instructing teachers to follow specific practices together with tight monitoring of their activities may help improve outcomes in under-performing schools that usually serve poor populations....

In this paper, we analyse the sources of time variation in consumer inflation across ten Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries and five sectors (durables, semidurables, non-durables, food, and services) in the period 2001-2013. With a multi-level factor model we decompose product-level...

Firms using online advertising regularly run experiments with multiple versions of their ads since they are uncertain about which ones are most effective. Within a campaign, firms try to adapt to intermediate results of their tests, optimizing what they earn while learning about their ads. But...

Few would contest that teachers are a very important determinant of whether students learn in school and how to improve teacher performance has been the focus of much policy debate in rich and poor countries. This paper examines how incentives, both pecuniary and non-pecuniary, correlate with...

This paper uses a RCT to estimate the effectiveness of guided instruction methods as implemented in under-performing schools in Chile. The intervention improved performance substantially for the first cohort of students, but not the second. The effect is mainly accounted for by children from...