Understanding and quantifying the determinants of the number of sectors or firms exporting in a given country is of relevance for the assessment of trade policies. Estimation of models for the number of sectors, however, poses a challenge because the dependent variable has both a lower and upper bound, implying that the partial effects of the explanatory variables on the conditional mean of the...

This paper focuses on nonparametric efficiency analysis based on robust estimation of partial frontiers in a complete multivariate setup (multiple inputs and multiple outputs). It introduces a-quantile efficiency scores. A nonparametric estimator is proposed achieving strong consistency and asymptotic normality. Then if a increases to one as a function of the sample size we recover the properti...

Individual data from a continuous distribution are often partitioned into a collection of intervals defined by either fixed interval limits or sample quantiles. In this study, we derive asymptotic distribution of interval statistics for both cases, allowing multiple sample statistics for each interval. Under fixed intervals, the covariance matrix is singular. We identify a computationally simpl...

Standard banking theory suggests that there exists an optimal level of credit risk that yields maximum bank profit. We identify the optimal level of risk-weighted assets that maximizes banks’ returns in the full sample of US banks over the period 1996–2011. We find that this optimal level is cyclical for the average bank, being higher than the realized credit risk in relatively stable periods w...

New Insights on Unemployment Duration and Post Unemployment Earnings in Germany: Censored Box-Cox Quantile Regression at Work In light of nonstationary search theory (van den Berg, 1990), this paper estimates the effects of benefit entitlement periods and the size of unemployment benefits on unemployment durations and post-unemployment earnings in West Germany. For the unemployment duration, we...

Abstract Height is the result of a complex process of growth that begins at birth and reaches the end in early adulthood. This paper studies the determinants of height from birth to maturity. A height production function is specified whose structure allows height to be the result of the accumulation of inputs (i.e., nutrition and diseases) over time. The empirical specification allows the causa...

This paper analyzes the conditions under which consistent estimation can be achieved in instrumental variables (IV ) regression when the available instruments are weak, in the local-to-zero sense of Staiger and Stock (1997) and using the many-instrument framework of Morimune (1983) and Bekker (1994). Our analysis of an extended k-class of estimators that includes Jackknife IV (JIV E) establishe...

The paper considers likelihood-based estimation of multivariate models, in which only marginal distributions are correctly specified. The unknown joint distribution is modelled with a copula function, which may be misspecified. In a GMM framework, we study robustness and efficiency of resulting estimators, propose improvements to existing estimators and discuss tests of copula validity. It is s...

This paper analyzes the relationship between households’ wealth and heterogeneous treatment impacts for a market-based training program that has benefited more than 40,000 disadvantaged individuals in Peru since 1996. We proxy long-run wealth by a linear index based on 21 household assets. Three main findings emerge. First, we find that voluntary choices among eligibles, rather than administrat...

This paper develops the methodology and asymptotic theory for the estimation of longrun variance of continuous time process. We analyze the asymptotic bias and variance of the longrun variance estimator in continuous time, and provide the optimal bandwidth balancing them o↵ and minimizing the asymptotic mean squared error. In the paper, we present not only how to consistently estimate the longr...