Economics Working Paper Archive
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Identification of Unobservables in Observations
(2022-12-05)In empirical studies, the data usually don't include all the variables of interest in an economic model. This paper shows the identification of unobserved variables in observations at the population level. When the observables ... -
The Effect of the COVID-19 Pandemic Recession on Less Educated Women's Human Capital: Some Projectsion
(2022-11-08)The recession induced by the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in major declines in employment of women, both from the demand side as firms reduced employment and from the supply side resulting from school closures and the closing ... -
Revealing Unobservables by Deep Learning: Generative Element Extraction Networks (GEEN)
(2022-10-03)Latent variable models are crucial in scientific research, where a key variable, such as effort, ability, and belief, is unobserved in the sample but needs to be identified. This paper proposes a novel method for estimating ... -
Take-up of Social Benefits
(2022-06-06)Take-up of a social benefit is usually defined as receiving a benefit for which an individual or household is eligible. The take-up rate is the fraction of those eligible for a program who participate and receive a benefit ... -
The Return to Work in Disablity Programs: What Has Been Learned and Next Steps
(Social Security Administration, 2022-01-24)We review a number of demonstrations conducted by the Social Security Administration which have attempted to improve labor market outcomes for disabled worker beneficiaries of the Social Security Disability Insurance ... -
The Supplemental Expenditure Poverty Measure: A New Method for Measuring Poverty
(2022-05-10)We propose a new measure of the rate of poverty we call the Supplemental Expenditure Poverty Measure (SEPM) based on expenditure in the Consumer Expenditure survey. It treats household expenditure as a measure of resources ... -
Imposing Commitment to Rein in Overconfidence in Learning
(2017-09-19)A rational principal delegates learning to an overconfident agent who overestimates the precision of the information he collects. The principal chooses between two contracts: commitment, in which the agent commits to the ... -
Reconciling Trends in U.S. Male Earnings Volatility: Results from Survey and Administrative Data
(2022-01-31)There is a large literature on earnings and income volatility in labor economics, household finance, and macroeconomics. One strand of that literature has studied whether individual earnings volatility has risen or fallen ... -
The Marginal Labor Supply Disincentives of Welfare: Evidence from Administrative Barriers to Participation
(2022-01-19)Existing research on the static effects of the manipulation of welfare program benefit parameters on labor supply has allowed only restrictive forms of heterogeneity in preferences. Yet preference heterogeneity implies ... -
Currency Wars, Trade Wars and Global Demand
(2021-12-17)This paper presents a tractable model of a global economy in which countries can use a broad range of policy instruments---the nominal interest rate, taxes on imports and exports, taxes on capital flows or foreign exchange ... -
To what extent are tariffs offset by exchange rates?
(2012-11-23) -
Rounding the corners of the trilemma: A simple framework
(2021-10-26) -
Deferred acceptance and regret-free truth-telling
(2018-06-01)The deferred acceptance mechanism has been widely adopted across centralized matching markets, despite the fact that it provides participants with opportunities to “game the system.” Accounting for the lack of information ... -
Refining Set-Identification in VARs through Independence
(2021-10-06)Identification in VARs has traditionally mainly relied on second moments. Some researchers have considered using higher moments as well, but there are concerns about the strength of the identification obtained in this ... -
The Economic Value of Breaking Bad: Misbehavior, Schooling and the Labor Market
(2014-01-31)Prevailing research argues that childhood misbehavior in the classroom is bad for schooling and, presumably, bad for labor market outcomes. In contrast, we argue that some childhood misbehavior represents underlying ... -
Identification of Causal Models with Unobservables: A Self-Report Approach
(2021-08-18)This paper presents a novel self-report approach to identify a general causal model with an unobserved covariate, which can be unobserved heterogeneity or an unobserved choice variable. It shows that a carefully designed ... -
COVID-19 and the U.S. Social Safety Net
(2020-09-06)We examine trends in employment, earnings, and incomes over the last two decades in the United States, and how the safety net has responded to changing fortunes, including the shutdown of the economy in response to the ...