Overconfidence seems to be an essential aspect of human nature, and one way to study overconfidence is to consider students' forecasts of their exam grades. Part of a student's grade expectation is based on the student's previous academic achievements; what remains can be interpreted as...

Violations of social norms can be costly to society and they are, in the case of large crimes, followed by prosecution. Minor misbehaviors — small crimes — do not usually result in legal proceedings. Although the economic consequences of a single small crime can be low, such crimes generate...

This paper reconsiders the ‘curse of resources' hypothesis for the case of China, and distinguishes between resource abundance, resource rents, and resource dependence. Resource abundance and resource rents are shown to be approximately equivalent, and their association with resource...

Two model averaging approaches are used and compared in estimating and forecasting dynamic factor models, the well-known BMA and the recently developed WALS. Both methods propose to combine frequentist estimators using Bayesian weights. We apply our framework to the Armenian economy using...

Prediction under model uncertainty is an important and difficult issue. Traditional prediction methods (such as pretesting) are based on model selection followed by prediction in the selected model, but the reported prediction and the reported prediction variance ignore the uncertainty from the...

The well-known transformation theorem (or change-of-variables theorem) is difficult to prove, requiring knowledge of theorems in advanced analysis. For this reason, it is stated without proof in all the statistics textbooks we know of. Here, we provide a new and much simpler proof, by exploiting...

Sensitivity analysis is important for its own sake and also in combination with diagnostic testing. We consider the question how to use sensitivity statistics in practice, in particular how to judge whether sensitivity is large or small. For this purpose we distinguish between absolute and...

We present a Bayesian estimation method applied to an extended set of national accounts data and estimates of approximately 2500 variables. The method is based on conventional national accounts frameworks as compiled by countries in Central America, in particular Guatemala, and on concepts that...

A linear structure is a family of matrices that satisfy a given set of linear restrictions, such as symmetry or diagonality. We add to the literature on linear structures by studying the family of matrices where all diagonal elements are zero, and discuss two econometric examples where these...

We derive closed-form expressions for the Jacobian of the matrix exponential function for both diagonalizable and defective matrices. The results are applied to two cases of interest in macroeconometrics: a continuous-time macro model and the parametrization of rotation matrices governing...