Improving educational quality is an important public policy goal. However, success requires identifying factors associated with student achievement. At the core of these proposals is the principle that increased public school quality can make school system more efficient, resulting in...

In this paper I estimate a model of competitive nonlinear pricing with multidimensional adverse selection. I model competition using a Stackelberg duopoly and solve the multidimensional screening problem by aggregating the multidimensional type into a single dimensional type. I study...

We propose a method to nonparametriclly estimate the revenue under a auction that is efficient and resilient to collusion [Chen and Micali, 2012]. Efficiency is achieved on account of a lower revenue and we propose a method to quantify this efficiency-revenue trade-off, i.e. the extra cost for...

Granger (1966) describes how the spectral shape of an economic variable concentrates spectral mass at low frequencies, declining smoothly as frequency increases. Despite a discussion about how to assess robustness of his results, the empirical exercise focused on the evidence obtained from a...

Most existing semi-parametric estimation procedures for binary choice models are based on the maximum score, maximum likelihood, or nonlinear least squares principles. These methods have two problems. They are difficult to compute and they may result in multiple local optima because they require...

The impact of trade liberalization on productivity and economic growth has received considerable attention in recent policy debate. Besides the theory, there is also a large body of empirical literature on the impact of trade policy reforms on productivity growth. We contribute to this...

The generalised autocovariance function is defined for a stationary stochastic process as the inverse Fourier transform of the power transformation of the spectral density function. Depending on the value of the transformation parameter, this function nests the inverse and the traditional...

We prove the uniqueness of linear i.i.d. representations of heavy-tailed processes whose distribution belongs to the domain of attraction of an $\alpha$-stable law, with $\alpha2$. This shows the possibility to identify nonparametrically both the sequence of two-sided moving average coefficients...

This paper applies a data envelopment analysis (DEA) method to assess technical efficiency of both private and public universities in Italy. Moving from the traditional context where inputs and outputs are assumed to be non-negative, a directional distance function approach has been applied in...

Common tree splitting strategies involve minimizing a criterion function for minimum impurity (i.e. difference) within child nodes. In this paper, we propose an approach based on maximizing a discriminatory criterion for maximum risk difference between child nodes. Maximum discriminatory...