A Note on Parametric and Nonparametric Regression in the Presence of Endogenous Control Variables This note argues that nonparametric regression not only relaxes functional form assumptions vis-a-vis parametric regression, but that it also permits endogenous control variables. To control for selection bias or to make an exclusion restriction in instrumental variables regression valid, additiona...

Decomposing the Composition Effect This paper proposes a decomposition of the composition effect, i.e. the part of the observed between-group difference in the distribution of some economic outcome that can be explained by differences in the distribution of covariates. Our decomposition contains three types of components: (i) the “direct contributions” of each covariate due to between-group dif...

We propose a novel estimator for the amount of international risk sharing that depends exclusively on asset returns data. In particular, our estimator has a nonparametric flavor in that it makes no parametric assumption on preferences and on the stochastic process that governs the dynamics of asset returns. This is in contrast with the existing estimators in the literature that either assume a ...

We address the empirical implementation of the static asset allocation problem by developing a forward-looking approach that uses information from market option prices. To this end, constant maturity S&P 500 implied distributions are extracted and subsequently transformed to the corresponding risk-adjusted ones. Then, we form optimal portfolios consisting of a risky and a risk-free asset and ev...

A two-step generalized method of moments estimation procedure can be made robust to heteroskedasticity and autocorrelation in the data by using a nonparametric estimator of the optimal weighting matrix. This paper addresses the issue of choosing the corresponding smoothing parameter (or bandwidth) so that the resulting point estimate is optimal in a certain sense. We derive an asymptotically op...

When analyzing economic games, researchers frequently estimate quantities describing group outcomes, such as the expected revenue in an auction. For such applications, we propose an improved statistical estimation technique called “recombinant estimation.” The technique takes observations of players’ strategies and recombines them to compute all possible group outcomes that could have resulted ...

Data on the life-cycle profiles of inequality in wages, earnings, hours worked and consumption contains precious information for answering questions about the ability of households to insure labor market risk and about the sources of this risk. This paper demonstrates that the choice of whether to control for cohort effects or for time effects has a drastic impact on the estimated age profiles ...

Nonlinearities in the drift and diffusion coefficients influence temporal dependence in scalar diffusion models. We study this link using two notions of temporal dependence: β − mixing and ρ − mixing. We show that β − mixing and ρ − mixing with exponential decay are essentially equivalent concepts for scalar diffusions. For stationary diffusions that fail to be ρ−mixing, we show that they are s...

Recent literature on semiparametric copula models focused on the situation when the marginals are specified nonparametrically and the copula function is given a parametric form. For example, this setup is used in Chen, Fan and Tsyrennikov (2006) [Efficient Estimation of Semiparametric Multivariate Copula Models, JASA] who focus on the efficient estimation of copula parameters. We consider a rev...

Using many moment conditions can improve efficiency but makes the usual GMM inferences inaccurate. Two step GMM is biased. Generalized empirical likelihood (GEL) has smaller bias but the usual standard errors are too small in instrumental variable settings. In this paper we give a new variance estimator for GEL that addresses this problem. It is consistent under the usual asymptotics and under ...