Most empirical studies on liquidity constraints classify a consumer as being constrained on the basis of a single indicator such as the asset to income ratio. In this analysis, we model the probability that a consumer faces liquidity constraints as a function of multiple social and economic...

Data sets that are terabytes in size are increasingly common, but computer bottlenecks often frustrate a complete analysis of the data, and diminishing returns suggest that we may not need terabytes of data to estimate a parameter or test a hypothesis. But which rows of data should we analyze,...

In this paper we develop some econometric theory for factor models of large dimensions. The focus is the determination of the number of factors (r), which is an unresolved issue in the rapidly growing literature on multifactor models. We first establish the convergence rate for the factor...

This paper studies estimation of panel co-integration models with cross-sectional dependence Generated by unobserved global stochastic trends. The standard least squares estimator is, in General, inconsistent owing to the spuriousness induced by the unobservable i(1) trends. We propose two...

Uncertainty about the future rises in recessions. But is uncertainty a source of business cycles or an endogenous response to them, and does the type of uncertainty matter? We propose a novel SVAR identification strategy to address these questions via inequality constraints on the structural...

We consider issues related to the order of an autoregression selected using information criteria. We study the sensitivity of the estimated order to (i) whether the effective number of observations is held fixed when estimating models of different order, (ii) whether the estimate of the variance...

We investigate familial relationships in consumption patterns using a sample of parents and their children from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. We find a positive and statistically significant parent-specific effect on children's consumption even after controlling for the effect of parental...

Skewness is a prevalent feature of macroeconomic time series and may arise exogenously because shocks are asymmetrically distributed, or endogenously, as shocks propagate through production networks. Previous theoretical work often studies these two possibilities in isolation. We nest all...