This paper uses age-at-school-entry policies to identify the effect of female education on fertility and infant health. We focus on sharp contrasts in schooling, fertility, and infant health between women born just before and after the school entry date. School entry policies affect female...

In this paper we propose a method to characterize the time series properties of individual consumption, income and interest rates using micro data, as studies in labour economics have characterized the time series properties of hours and earnings. Our approach, however, does not remove aggregate...

This paper discusses inference for rational expectations models estimated via minimum distance methods by characterizing the probability beliefs regarding the data generating process (DGP) that are compatible with given moment conditions. The null hypothesis is taken to be rational expectations...

This paper is the first systematic attempt to measure the existence and degree of dowry inflation in South Asia. The popular press and scholarly literature have assumed dowry inflation in South Asia for some time, and there are now a number of theoretical papers that have attempted to explain...

This paper disentangles fluctuations in disaggregated prices due to macroeconomic and sectoral conditions using a factor-augmented vector autoregression estimated on a large data set. On the basis of this estimation, we establish eight facts: (1) Macroeconomic shocks explain only about 15% of...

This paper characterizes the transmission mechanism of monetary shocks across countries of the euro area, documents how this mechanism has changed with the introduction of the euro, and explores some potential explanations. The factor-augmented VAR (FAVAR) framework used is sufficiently rich to...

This paper describes a method for calculating daily real-time estimates of the current state of the U.S. economy. The estimates are computed from data on scheduled U.S. macroeconomic announcements using an econometric model that allows for variable reporting lags, temporal aggregation, and other...

Forecasting using `diffusion indices' has received a good deal of attention in recent years. The idea is to use the common factors estimated from a large panel of data to help forecast the series of interest. This paper assesses the extent to which the forecasts are influenced by (i) how the...

This paper presents a new multivariate copula-based modeling approach for analyzing cost-offsets between drug and nondrug expenditures. Estimates are based on panel data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) with quarterly measures of medical expenditures. The approach allows for...

I study a many-to-many, two-sided, transferable-utility matching game. Consider data on matches or relationships between agents but not on the choice set of each agent. I investigate what economic parameters can be learned from data on equilibrium matches and agent characteristics. Features of a...