We consider an observation-driven location model where the unobserved location variable is modeled as a random walk process and where the error variable is from a mixture of normal distributions. The mixed normal distribution can approximate many continuous error distributions accurately. We...

A sizeable proportion of enterprises, especially SMEs, assisted by the government, will fail to repay. Should a screening mechanism then be applied to deter those most likely to default from seeking such financial assistance? The answer depends on the relative weights attached to the competitive...

This article presents a filter for state-space models based on Bellman's dynamic programming principle applied to the mode estimator. The proposed Bellman filter (BF) generalises the Kalman filter (KF) including its extended and iterated versions, while remaining equally inexpensive...

We propose a dynamic factor model which we use to analyze the relationship between education participation and national unemployment, as well as to forecast the number of students across the many different types of education. By clustering the factor loadings associated with the dynamic...

A new and rapidly growing econometric literature is making advances in the problem of using machine learning (ML) methods for causal inference questions. Yet, the empirical economics literature has not started to fully exploit the strengths of these modern methods. We revisit influential...

Preferences for monetary and non-monetary job attributes are important for understanding workers' motivation and the organization of work. Little is known, however, about how those job preferences are formed. We study how macroeconomic conditions when young shape workers' job preferences for the...

Sexual minorities have had worse than average mental health, which may have to do with actual or perceived discrimination. Same-sex marriage legalization (SSML) is a typical anti-discrimination policy removing marital restrictions for sexual minorities. We study how this legislation affected...

Probit models with endogenous regressors are commonly used models in economics and other social sciences. Yet, the robustness properties of parametric estimators in these models have not been formally studied. In this paper, we derive the influence functions of the endogenous probit model’s...

We offer a theory of how the combination of budget constraints and insurance drives up prices. A natural context for our theory is the health care market, where drug prices can be very high. Our model predicts that monopoly prices for orphan drugs are inversely related to the prevalence up until...

We develop a new targeted maximum likelihood estimation method that provides improved forecasting for misspecified linear autoregressive models. The method weighs data points in the observed sample and is useful in the presence of data generating processes featuring structural breaks, complex...