In this paper, we estimate the time-varying COVID-19 contact rate of a Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) model. Our measurement of the contact rate is constructed using data on actively infected, recovered and deceased cases. We propose a new trend filtering method that is a variant of the...

Asymptotic inference in nonlinear vector error correction models (VECM) that exhibit regime-specific short-run dynamics is nonstandard and complicated. This paper contributes the literature in several important ways. First, we establish the consistency of the least squares estimator of the...

It has been well known in financial economics that factor betas depend on observed instruments such as firm specific characteristics and macroeconomic variables, and a key object of interest is the effect of instruments on the factor betas. One of the key features of our model is that we specify...