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Working Paper
Bias in Local Projections
Local projections (LPs) are a popular tool in applied macroeconomic research. We survey the related literature and find that LPs are often used with very small samples in the time dimension. With small sample sizes, given the high degree of persistence in most macroeconomic data, impulse responses estimated by LPs can be severely biased. This is true even if the right-hand-side variable in the LP is iid, or if the data set includes a large cross-section (i.e., panel data). We derive a simple expression to elucidate the source of the bias. Our expression highlights the interdependence between ...
Working Paper
Breaking the “Iron Rice Bowl” and Precautionary Swings: Evidence from Chinese State-Owned Enterprises Reform
We use China?s large-scale reform of state-owned enterprises (SOE) in the late 1990s as a natural experiment to identify and quantify the importance of precautionary savings for wealth accumulation. Before the reform, SOE workers enjoyed the same job security as government employees. After the reform, a cumulative of over 35 million SOE workers have been laid off, although government employees kept their ?iron rice bowl.? The change in unemployment risks for SOE workers relative to that of government employees before and after the reform provides a clean identification of income uncertainty ...
Working Paper
Bias in Local Projections
Local projections (LPs) are a popular tool in macroeconomic research. We show that LPs are often used with very small samples in the time dimension. Consequently, LP point estimates can be severely biased. We derive simple expressions for this bias and propose a way to bias-correct LPs. Small sample bias can also lead autocorrelation-robust standard errors to dramatically understate sampling uncertainty. We argue they should be avoided in LPs like the ones we study. Using identified monetary policy shocks, we demonstrate that the bias in point estimates can be economically meaningful and the ...
Working Paper
The Moderating Role of Green Energy and Energy-Innovation in Environmental Kuznets: Insights from Quantile-Quantile Analysis
The recent environmental challenges in Africa that emanated from global warming, human activity, limited access to electricity and overexploitation of natural resources have contributed to the growth of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in the region. This paper empirically investigates the moderating role of green energy consumption and energy innovation in the environmental Kuznets curve for the Sub-Saharan African (SSA) region using data spanning from 1980 to 2018. Our threshold model found that at least 54 percent of the population needs access to energy innovation before the region could be ...
Working Paper
Regular Variation of Popular GARCH Processes Allowing for Distributional Asymmetry
Linear GARCH(1,1) and threshold GARCH(1,1) processes are established as regularly varying, meaning their heavy tails are Pareto like, under conditions that allow the innovations from the, respective, processes to be skewed. Skewness is considered a stylized fact for many financial returns assumed to follow GARCH-type processes. The result in this note aids in establishing the asymptotic properties of certain GARCH estimators proposed in the literature.
Working Paper
Correcting for Endogeneity in Models with Bunching
We show that in models with endogeneity, bunching at the lower or upper boundary of the distribution of the treatment variable may be used to build a correction for endogeneity. We derive the asymptotic distribution of the parameters of the corrected model, provide an estimator of the standard errors, and prove the consistency of the bootstrap. An empirical application reveals that time spent watching television, corrected for endogeneity, has roughly no net effect on cognitive skills and a significant negative net effect on non-cognitive skills in children.
Report
The behavior of uncertainty and disagreement and their roles in economic prediction: a panel analysis
This paper examines point and density forecasts from the European Central Bank?s Survey of Professional Forecasters. We derive individual uncertainty measures along with individual point- and density-based measures of disagreement. We also explore the relationship between uncertainty and disagreement, as well as their roles in respondents? forecast performance and forecast revisions. We observe substantial heterogeneity in respondents? uncertainty and disagreement. In addition, there is little co-movement between uncertainty and disagreement, and forecast performance shows a more robust ...