One recent policy tend to improve teacher quality is providing conditional grants to trainees in teacher colleges and commit them to working in disadvantaged areas upon graduation. Yet little is known whether such policies attract better trainees. This paper evaluates a conditional grant program...

Using transactions conducted by publicly listed firms in China’s primary land market during 2000-2012 as a case study, we confirm that political connections are essentially corruption. By constructing unique measures to partial out the key factors confounding political connections, namely...

This paper examines how fiscal incentives affect the policy choices of local governments in the context of China. Based on exogenous changes in the intergovernmental revenue sharing scheme, we construct a simulated instrumental variable to resolve the endogeneity problem. We find evidence that...

In this paper, we propose a new framework to coherently produce probabilistic mortality forecasts by exploiting techniques in seasonal time-series models, extreme value theory (EVT), and hierarchical forecast reconciliation. We are amongst the first to model and analyze U.S. monthly death counts...

In early 2004, the U.S. Government initiated the Medicare Discount Drug Card Program, under which a large amount of pharmacy-level price data pertaining to over 800 drugs has been released weekly on the Medicare Web site continuously between May 29, 2004 and October 2005. This extensive...

This paper contributes to insurance risk management by modeling extreme climate risk and extreme mortality risk in an integrated manner via extreme value theory (EVT). We conduct an empirical study using monthly temperature and death data in the U.S., and nd that the joint extremes in cold...

The People's Republic of China (PRC) has made massive investments since the late 1990s in highway infrastructure, connecting its rural and urban regions. In this paper, we study the impact of highway investments on the educational choices in rural PRC. Because enhanced connectivity facilitates...

Direct and indirect exposure to terrorist attacks can have a significant impact on major life decisions, including the choice of whether to have a child. This study aims to investigate how terrorist attacks affect fertility. By pooling data from three years of cross-sectional surveys conducted...

We introduce the function principal component regression (FPCR) forecasting method to model and forecast age-specific survival functions observed over time. The age distribution of survival functions is an example of constrained data whose values lie within a unit interval. Because of the...