The question of whether governments spend too much or too little has been a frequent subject of debate, but has been infrequently analyzed.This paper proposes and then applies a methodology which checks to see whether the "Samuelson condition" for the efficient provision of local public...

This paper provides a systematic analysis of identification in linear social interactions models. This is both a theoretical and an econometric exercise as the analysis is linked to a rigorously delineated model of interdependent decisions. We develop an incomplete information game that...

Machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) have been around for many years. However, in the last 5 years, remarkable progress has been made using multilayered neural networks in diverse areas such as image recognition, speech recognition, and machine translation. AI is a general...

We consider the problem of short-term time series forecasting (nowcasting) when there are more possible predictors than observations. Our approach combines three Bayesian techniques: Kalman filtering, spike-and-slab regression, and model averaging. We illustrate this approach using search engine...

In this paper, we argue that in designing government debt and tax-transfer policies, it is important to consider their implications for the allocation of risk between generations. There is no reason to presume that the market or the family can allocate risk efficiently to future generations,...