Research from the United States shows that gaps in early cognitive and non-cognitive ability appear early in the life cycle. Little is known about this important question for developing countries. This paper provides new evidence of sharp differences in cognitive development by socioeconomic...

This research starts from the observation that common desmoothing models are likely to generate some extreme returns. Such returns will distort risk measurement and hence can lead to investment decisions that are suboptimal relative to those that would be made if a transaction based index were...

Protecting portfolio against extreme losses is a fundamentally difficult task since past experience provides a poor guidance for the future. This paper focuses on a robust approach to the portfolio insurance, which does not require historical calibration, and therefore avoids the hazards of data...

Does the mere exposure of a subject to a belief elicitation task affect the very same beliefs that we are trying to elicit? Is it theoretically possible to guarantee that this will not be the case? In this paper, we introduce mechanisms that make it simultaneously strictly dominant for the...

Composite indicators are widely used to determine the ranking of countries, organizations or individuals in terms of overall performance on multiple criteria. Their calculation requires standardization of the individual statistical criteria and aggregation of the standardized indicators. These...

Decision-makers who usually face model/parameter risk may prefer to act prudently by identifying optimal contracts that are robust to such sources of uncertainty. In this paper, we tackle this issue under a finite uncertainty set that contains a number of probability models that are candidates...