In the 2001 U.S. Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), 27% of households report simultaneously revolving significant credit card debt and holding sizeable amounts of low-return liquid assets; this is known as the \credit card debt puzzle". In this paper, I quantitatively evaluate the role of...

New asymptotic approximations are established for the Wald and t statistics in the presence of unknown but strong autocorrelation. The asymptotic theory extends the usual fixed-smoothing asymptotics under weak dependence to allow for near unit root and weak unit root processes. As the locality...

Fisheries are subject to multiple forms of uncertainty. One of these, parameter uncertainty, has been largely ignored in the fisheries economics literature even though it is known elsewhere (e.g., macroeconomics) to play an important role in models with a similar structure. We model management...

Give a risk neutral investor the choice to acquire a costly signal prior to Walrasian asset market equilibrium. She refuses to pay for the signal. The reason is that a risk neutral investor is indifferent between a risky stock or a safe bond in equilibrium and expects the same return to her...

We consider the problem of estimating the variance of the partial sums of a stationary time series that has either long memory, short memory, negative/intermediate memory, or is the first-difference of such a process. The rate of growth of this variance depends crucially on the type of...

The evolution of financial markets is a complicated real-world phenomenon that ranks at the top in terms o fdifficulty of modeling and/or prediction. One reason for this difficulty is the well-documented nonlinearity that is inherently at work. The state-of-the-art on the nonlinear modeling of...

It is shown that the limiting distribution of the augmented Dickey-Fuller (ADF) test under the null hypothesis of a unit root is valid under a very general set of assumptions that goes far beyond the linear AR (∞) process assumption typically imposed. In essence, all that is required is...

A longstanding and yet unsettled question in labor economics is: does marriage cause men's wages to rise? Cross-sectional wage studies consistently find that married men earn significantly higher wages than do men who are not currently married. However, it is well-known that inferring causal...

This paper derives primitive conditions for global identification in nonlinear simultaneous equations systems. Identification is semiparametric in the sense tht it is based on a set of unconditional moment restrictions. Our contribution to the literature is twofold. First, we derive a set of...

The paper considers theoretical and empirical evidence on the impact of standards-based school reform. Our theoretical synthesis distinguishes between sorting and incentive effects of high standards, and spells out the potential tradeoffs and complementarities between enhancing efficiency and...