Standard measures of productivity display enormous dispersion across farms in Africa. Crop yields and input intensities appear to vary greatly, seemingly in conflict with a model of efficient allocation across farms. In this paper, we present a theoretical framework for distinguishing between...

The objective of this paper is twofold: it aims at evaluating the quality of the consumption module in the ACDIS data, addressing measurement error and missing information. Estimates of household consumption are in fact sensitive to both issues (Ardington, Lam et al. 2006). Secondly, it aims at...

We develop non-asymptotically justified methods for hypothesis testing about the $p-$dimensional coefficients $\theta^{*}$ in (possibly nonlinear) regression models. Given a function $h:\,\mathbb{R}^{p}\mapsto\mathbb{R}^{m}$, we consider the null hypothesis $H_{0}:\,h(\theta^{*})\in\Omega$...

This paper provides a detailed description of a new measure of reserve error, the Full Information Reserve Error (FIRE), which was first proposed by Grace and Leverty (2018). We briefly describe the philosophy of FIRE and its advantages. We then present the details on how to calculate it. We...

This paper develops a general framework for conducting inference on the rank of an unknown matrix \Pi_0. A defining feature of our setup is the null hypothesis of the form H_0: rank(\Pi_0)\leq r. The problem is of first order importance because the previous literature focuses on H_0':...

We propose an econometric procedure to test for the presence of overconfidence using data collected by ranking experiments. Our approach applies the techniques from the moment inequality literature. Although a ranking experiment is a typical way to collect data for the analysis of...

We compile data for 186 countries (1919 - 2016) and apply different aggregation methods to create new democracy indices. We observe that most of the available aggregation techniques produce indices that are often too favorable for autocratic regimes and too unfavorable for democratic regimes....

Intergenerational persistence estimates are susceptible to several well-documented biases arising from income measurement, and it has become standard practice to construct income measures to mitigate these. However, remaining bias can lead to a spurious grandparent coefficient estimate in...