Empirical welfare analyses often impose stringent parametric assumptions on individuals’ preferences and neglect unobserved preference heterogeneity. In this paper, we develop a framework to conduct individual and social welfare analysis for discrete choice that does not suffer from these...

A correlation curve is introduced as a tool to study the degree of intergenerational income mobility, i.e. how income status is related between parents and adult child. The method overcomes the shortcomings of the elasticity of children's income with respect to parents' income (i.e. its...

A correlation curve is introduced as a tool to study the degree of intergenerational income mobility, i.e. how income status is related between parents and adult child. The method overcomes the shortcomings of the elasticity of children’s income with respect to parents’ income (i.e. its...

This article estimates a nonparametric model of earnings to examine the black/white wage gap. This article extends the Oaxaca decomposition and adjusted wage ratios to a nonlinear form, to allow the use of this nonparametric approach. It finds that the results obtained nonparametrically are very...

Empirical welfare analyses often impose stringent parametric assumptions on individuals' preferences and neglect unobserved preference heterogeneity. In this paper, we develop a framework to conduct individual and social welfare analysis for discrete choice that does not suffer from these...

The purpose of this paper is to sort out firm-related differences from effects that result from different economic structures. A non-parametric decomposition is used to analyse firm level difference between the wage spread in the two major regions of unified Germany. If firm-specific effects...

The paper develops a non-parametric, non-stationary framework for business-cycle dating based on an innovative statistical methodology known as Adaptive Weights Smoothing (AWS). The methodology is used both for the study of the individual macroeconomic time series relevant to the dating of the...

In this paper we show that findings of an apparently instable popularity function of U.S. presidents, as reported in the previous literature, are likely the consequence of the common use of linear estimation techniques. Employing Penalized Spline Smoothing in the context of Additive Mixed Models...

We propose a novel approach to model serially dependent positive-valued variables which realize a non-trivial proportion of zero outcomes. This is a typical phenomenon in financial time series observed at high frequencies, such as cumulated trading volumes. We introduce a flexible point-mass...

Recent work on production functions estimation revealed that substantial biases can be introduced into the estimates when the assumption of perfect competition and price exogeneity is not satisfied in the data itself. As Klette and Griliches (1996) show applying traditional econometrics in...