Despite the recovery of economic growth in Latin America during the 1990s, rising unemployment, high informality rates and sluggish wages lie at the root of high inequality and poverty. This paper looks at changes in hourly earnings from the early 1990s to the early 2000s in three relatively...

Health economists have studied the determinants of the expected value of health status as a function of medical and nonmedical inputs, often finding small marginal effects of the former. This paper argues that both types of input have an additional benefit, viz. a reduced variability of health...

In this paper we outline (i) why sigma-convergence may not accompany beta-convergence, (ii) discuss evidence of beta-convergence in the U.S., and (iii) use U.S. county-level data containing over 3,000 cross-sectional observations to demonstrate that sigma-convergence has not occurred at the...

Using the newly developed KOF-index of globalization, as well as the economic freedom index from the Fraser institute, we examine if globalization and economic liberalizations are linked to increases in income inequality within countries. Studying changes between 1980 and 2000, we find a...

Macroeconomic time series often involve a threshold effect in theirARMA representation, and exhibit long memory features. In this paperwe introduce a new class of threshold ARFIMA models to account forthis. The threshold effect is introduced in the autoregressive and/or thefractional integration...

The objective of this paper is to extend the results on Pseudo Maximum Likelihood(PML) theory derived in Gourieroux, Monfort, and Trognon (GMT)(1984) to a situation where the rst four conditional moments are specied.Such an extension is relevant in light of pervasive evidence that conditional...

This paper explores a semiparametric version of a time-varying regression, where a subset of the regressors have a fixed coefficient and the rest a time-varying one. We provide an estimation method and establish associated theoretical properties of the estimates and standard errors in extended...

It is well known that the class of strong (Generalized) AutoRegressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (or GARCH) processes is not closed under contemporaneous aggregation. This paper provides the dynamics followed by the aggregate process when the individual persistence parameters are drawn from...

The estimation of multivariate GARCH models remains a challenging task, even in modern computer environments. This manuscript shows how Independent Component Analysiscan be used to estimate the Generalized Orthogonal GARCH model in a fraction of the time otherwise required. The proposed method...

We study Tikhonov Regularized estimation of quantile structural effects implied by a nonseparable model. The nonparametric instrumental variable estimator is based on a minimum distance principle. We show that the minimum distance problem without regularization is locally ill-posed, and consider...