This discussion paper resulted in an article in the <I>Journal of Development Economics</I> (2013). Volume 103, pages 43-51.<P> To raise school attendance, many programs in developing countries eliminate orreduce private contributions to education. This paper documents an unintendednegative effect of such...</p></i>

This paper presents evidence about the impact on school enrollment of a program in Ecuador that gives cash transfers to the 40 percent poorest families. The evaluation design consists of a randomized experiment for families around the first quintile of the poverty index and of a regression...

This paper studies vector autoregressive models with parsimoniously time-varying parameters. The parameters are assumed to follow parsimonious random walks, where parsimony stems from the assumption that increments to the parameters have a non-zero probability of being exactly equal to zero. We...

We propose a new estimator, the thresholded scaled Lasso, in high dimensional threshold regressions. First, we establish an upper bound on the <I>ℓ</I><SUB>∞</SUB> estimation error of the scaled Lasso estimator of Lee et al. (2012). This is a non-trivial task as the literature on high-dimensional models has...</sub></i>