Using self-assessed health status together with several indicators of individual morbidity and socio-demographic characteristics, we study the quality of health and income related health disparity in five racial/ethnic groups as well as across 17 geographic areas of New York State. The American...

While the yield spread has long been recognized as a good predictor of recessions, it seems to have been largely overlooked by professional forecasters. We examine this puzzle, established by Rudebusch and Williams (2009), in a data-rich environment including not just the yield spread but many...

We propose serial correlation robust asymptotic confidence bands for the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves estimated by quasi-maximum likelihood in the binormal model. Our simulation experiments confirm that this new method performs fairly well in finite samples. The conventional...

We propose a generalized ordered response model that nests the popular Carlson-Parkin (CP) method to quantify household in flation expectations while explicitly control for cross-sectional heterogeneity in the threshold parameters and the variance. By matching qualitative and quantitative data...

Using data from the 1992 US National Survey of Veterans, we analyze Medicare-eligible veterans' use of VA and non-VA outpatient health care services. We apply a utility consistent, combined multinomial choice and count data model to identify factors that affect these veterans' outpatient health...

Based on 1992 US National Survey of Veterans, we analyzed the nature of veterans' inpatient and outpatient health care utilization by estimating a count data two-part hurdle model. We also identified factors that affect veterans' choices between VA and non- VA health care facilities, using a...

Binary events are involved in many economic decision problems. In recent years, considerable progress has been made in diverse disciplines in developing models for forecasting binary outcomes. We distinguish between two types of forecasts for binary events that are generally obtained as the...

We study the role of consumer confidence surveys in forecasting personal consumption expenditure. We reexamine existing models of consumption and consumer confidence using both quarterly and monthly data in real time. Additionally, we produce forecasts of consumption expenditures with and...