We introduce a novel measure, valuation accuracy score (VAS), to assess the valuation skills of investment-grade corporate bond mutual funds. VAS recognizes funds holding a higher (lower) fraction of underpriced (overpriced) corporate bonds as ex-ante having better valuation skills. VAS is...

This paper develops IV estimators for unconditional quantile treatment effects (QTE) when the treatment selection is endogenous. In contrast to conditional QTE, i.e. the effects conditional on a large number of covariates X, the unconditional QTE summarize the effects of a treatment for the...

We introduce a new measure to assess the valuation skills of investment-grade corporate bond funds. Our measure recognizes funds that ex-ante hold a higher fraction of undervalued bonds as having better valuation skills. The measure predicts future fund performance, is stable over time, and is...

This paper extends the transformed maximum likelihood approach for estimation of dynamic panel data models by Hsiao, Pesaran, and Tahmiscioglu (2002) to the case where the errors are cross-sectionally heteroskedastic. This extension is not trivial due to the incidental parameters problem that...

The use of height data to measure living standards is now a well-established method in the economic literature. While much is known about 19th century black legal and material conditions, less is known about how 19th century biological conditions were related to the physical environment and...

Using linked employer-employee data from the German Structure of Earnings Survey 2001, this paper provides a comprehensive picture of the wage structure in three wage-setting regimes prevalent in the German system of industrial relations. We analyze wage distributions for various labor market...

Although attempts to measure trends in prices, output, and employment can be traced back for centuries, in the main the origins of the U.S. federal statistics are to be found in bitter debates over economic policy, ultimately debates over the distribution of income, at the end of the nineteenth...

A major challenge facing statistical agencies is the problem of adjusting price and quantity indexes for changes in the availability of commodities. This problem arises in the scanner data context as products in a commodity stratum appear and disappear in retail outlets. Hicks suggested a...