When is one distribution (of income, consumption, or some other economic variable) more equal or better than another? This question has proven difficult to answer in situations where distribution functions intersect and no unambiguous ranking can be attained without introducing weaker criteria...

Latent class, or finite mixture, modelling has proved a very popular, and relatively easy, way of introducing much-needed heterogeneity into empirical models right across the social sciences. The technique involves (probabilistically) splitting the population into a finite number of (relatively...

Asymptotic and bootstrap tests are studied for testing whether there is a relation of stochastic dominance between two distributions. These tests have a null hypothesis of nondominance, with the advantage that, if this null is rejected, then all that is left is dominance. This also leads us to...

Large differences in mortality rates across those with different levels of education are a well- established fact. This association between mortality and education may partly be explained by confounding factors, including cognitive ability. Cognitive ability may also be affected by education so...

The Short-Time Compensation (STC) program enables US firms to reduce work hours via pro-rated Unemployment Insurance (UI) benefits, rather than relying on layoffs as a cost-cutting tool. Despite the program's potential to preclude skill loss and rehiring/ retraining costs, firms' participation...

In this paper, we compare individual survival curves constructed from objective (actual mortality) and elicited subjective information (probability of survival to a given target age). We develop a methodology to estimate jointly subjective and objective individual-survival curves accounting for...

This study examines factors predicting participation in study abroad programs using a bivariate probit selection model where the probabilities of attending university and studying abroad are jointly estimated. Given that unobserved variables influencing these two sequential events are likely to...

Little is known about how gamblers estimate probabilities from multiple information sources. This paper reports on a preregistered study that administered an incentivized Bayesian choice task to n=465 participants (self-reported gamblers and non-gamblers). Our data failed to support our main...

Lenders condition future loans on some index of past performance. Typically, banks condition future loans on repayments of earlier obligations whilst international organizations (official lenders) condition future loans on the implementation of some policy action (‘investment’). We build an...