There is debate about whether maximum residue limits (MRLs) for pesticides act as a catalyst or barrier to trade. By constructing a trade model based on heterogeneous firm quality and productivity, we show that MRLs' net effects on total export value, the number of exporting firms, and the...

In-service teacher training aims to improve the supply of public education. A randomized experiment was conducted in Mexico to test whether teacher training could increase teacher efficiency in public secondary schools. After seven and a half months of exposure to a trained teacher, students...

This study explores sex differences in language and socio-emotional skills. It focuses on children 7 months old to 6 years old in Chile in 2012 and Nicaragua in 2013. A focus on young children allowed for ruling out a set of environmental and identity effects to explain the gap. Females had an...

This study explores sex differences in language and socio-emotional skills on children 7 months to 6 years old in Latin-America. Females had a significant advantage in both dimensions. To our knowledge, this is the first study to document sex differences in these dimensions at a very young age....

In this study, we find that the average cash flow risk (CFR) of United States firms shows a significantly increasing trend over the past four decades or so. This does not portend well considering the significance of cash flows in maintaining a firm’s financial health and going concern status....

We consider the problem of model averaging over a set of semiparametric varying coefficient models where the varying coefficients can be functions of continuous and categorical variables. We propose a Mallows model averaging procedure that is capable of delivering model averaging estimators with...

In this paper we present a new nonparametric method for estimating a conditional quantile function and develop its weak convergence theory. The proposed estimator is computationally easy-to-implement, and automatically ensures quantile monotonicity by construction. For inference, we propose to...