This paper estimates the rate of return to the High/Scope Perry Preschool Program, an early intervention program targeted toward disadvantaged African-American youth. Estimates of the rate of return to the Perry program are widely cited to support the claim of substantial economic benefits from...

Including disaggregate variables or using information extracted from the disaggregate variables into a forecasting model for an eco- nomic aggregate may improve the forecasting accuracy. In this paper we suggest to use boosting as a method to select the disaggregate variables which are most...

This study uses factor analysis to simplify the complex relationships among stock markets and to reduce the number of markets required for portfolio construction. Our sample consists of the US and 11 Asia-Pacific stock markets. We find that the reduced portfolio obtained from factor analysis has...

Increasingly, grade retention is viewed as an important alternative to social promotion, yet evidence to date is unable to disentangle how the effect of grade retention varies by abilities and over time. The key challenge is differential selection of students into retention across grades and by...

We use a panel cointegration model with multiple time- varying individual effects to control for the enigmatic missing factors in the credit spread puzzle. Our model specification enables as to capture the unobserved dynamics of the systematic risk premia in the bond market. In order to estimate...