The paper presents empirical results on the discounting of delayed payoffs which show that: (1) the best approximation of the discounting process is a hyperbolic function, (2) (both animals and humans) can reverse their preferences in time. The article presents theoretical conditions on the...

We examine the estimation problem for shape-restricted functions that are continuous, non-negative, monotone non-decreasing, and strictly concave. A sieve estimator based on bivariate Bernstein polynomials is proposed. This estimator is drawn from a sieve, a set of shape-restricted Bernstein...

The econometric literature offers various modeling approaches for analyzing micro data in combination with time series of aggregate data. This paper discusses the estimation of a VAR model that allows unobserved heterogeneity across observation unit, as well as unobserved time-specific...