While economists have long been interested in effects of health and human capital on productivity, less attention has been paid to the influence of time use. We investigate the productivity effects of the single largest use of time--sleep. Because sleep influences performance on memory...

This study examines evidence of structural breaks in models of predictable components in stock returns related to state variables such as the lagged dividend yield, Treasury bill rate, term spread and default premium. We examine a large set of size-and-industry-sorted profolios of US stocks as...

The paper studies whether immigration affects the probability of high school graduation of American-born minorities. Since both the costs and the benefits of education are likely to rise due to immigration, the direction of the impact is ambiguous. The paper uses pooled 1980 and 1990 Census data...

In order to construct prediction intervals without the combersome--and typically unjustifiable--assumption of Gaussianity, some form of resampling is necessary. The regression set-up has been well-studies in the literature but time series prediction faces additional difficulties. The paper at...

Previous estimates of the effect of unemployment on crime commonly omit determinants of criminal behavior that vary with the business cycle, creating correlation between unemployment rates and the residuals in aggregate crime regressions. In this paper, we employ several strategies that attempt...

Recent work in econometrics has provided large bandwidth asymptotic theory for taper-based studentized estimates of the mean, in the context of nonparametric estimation for serially correlated time series data. These taper-based statistics can be viewed as estimates of the spectral density at...

We evaluate whether driving restrictions improve air quality.  While Milan's restriction decreases overall air pollution, there is a significant behavioral response that attenuates the effect.  Our study expoits the natural experiment created by an unanticipated court injunction suspending...

This paper derives necessary and sufficient conditions for nonparametric transformation models to be (i) correctly specified, and (ii) identified. Our correct specification conditions come in a form of partial differential equations; when satisfied by the true distribution, they ensure that the...

Motivated by evidence on the importance of incomplete information and networks in international trade, we investigate the supply of "network intermediation." We hypothesize that the agents who become international trade intermediaries first accumulate networks of foreign contacts while working...