The authors model COVID infections and COVID deaths, both reported and implied, for the 50 U.S. states as well as the District of Columbia, and separately for a sample of 33 countries, as a function of pre-existing circumstances that citizens have no ability to control over the short term. These...

Some existing nonparametric two-sample tests for equality of multivariate distributions perform unsatisfactorily when the two sample sizes are unbalanced. In particular, the power of these tests tends to diminish with increasingly unbalanced sample sizes. In this paper, we propose a new testing...

Investors typically measure an asset’s potential to diversify a portfolio by its correlations with the portfolio’s other assets, but correlation is useful only if it provides a good estimate of how an asset’s returns co-occur cumulatively with the other asset returns over the investor’s...

We introduce a data driven and model free approach for computing conditional expectations. The new method is based on classical techniques combined with machine learning methods. In particular, we consider kernel density estimation based on simulated risk factors combined with a control variate....

This paper examines the effect of systematic self-report bias, the non-random deviation between the self-reported and true values of the same measure. This bias may be constant or variable, and can mislead empirical analyses based on descriptive statistics, program evaluation and instrumental...

We present a general framework for Bayesian estimation and causality assessment in epidemiological models. The key to our approach is the use of sequential Monte Carlo methods to evaluate the likelihood of a generic epidemiological model. Once we have the likelihood, we specify priors and rely...

Precise estimates of price elasticities are important for alcohol tax policy. Using meta-analysis, this paper corrects average beer elasticities for heterogeneity, dependence, and publication selection bias. A sample of 191 estimates is obtained from 114 primary studies. Simple and weighted...

We present a general framework for Bayesian estimation and causality assessment in epidemiological models. The key to our approach is the use of sequential Monte Carlo methods to evaluate the likelihood of a generic epidemiological model. Once we have the likelihood, we specify priors and rely...

Health expenditure data almost always include extreme values. Such heavy tails can be a threat to the commonly adopted least squares methods. To accommodate extreme values, we propose the use of an estimation method that recovers the often ignored right tail of health expenditure distributions....

This paper investigates methods to estimate the upper tail of the wealth distribution. I compare data types and estimation methods using data from the Netherlands for the period 1993–2018, exploiting the unique availability of multiple types of data for this context. In addition to comparing...