{"title":"Heavy tailed but not Zipf: Firm and establishment size in the United States","authors":"Illenin O. Kondo, Logan T. Lewis, Andrea Stella","doi":"10.1002/jae.2976","DOIUrl":"10.1002/jae.2976","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>Heavy tails play an important role in modern macroeconomics and international economics. Previous work often assumes a Pareto distribution for firm size, typically with a shape parameter approaching Zipf's law. This convenient approximation has dramatic consequences for the importance of large firms in the economy. But we show that a lognormal distribution, or better yet, a convolution of a lognormal and a non-Zipf Pareto distribution, provides a better description of the US economy, using confidential Census Bureau data. These findings hold even far in the upper tail and suggest that heterogeneous firm models should more systematically explore deviations from Zipf's law.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":48363,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Applied Econometrics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2023-04-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47971124","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Carolina Caetano, Gregorio Caetano, Juan Carlos Escanciano
{"title":"Regression discontinuity design with multivalued treatments","authors":"Carolina Caetano, Gregorio Caetano, Juan Carlos Escanciano","doi":"10.1002/jae.2982","DOIUrl":"10.1002/jae.2982","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>We study identification and estimation in the regression discontinuity design with a multivalued treatment. We show that heterogeneity in the first stage discontinuities can be used for the identification of the marginal treatment effects under an alternative assumption, namely, the homogeneity of the LATEs along some covariates. This assumption can often be tested and relaxed. Our estimator can be programmed as a simple two-stage least squares regression, and packaged standard errors and tests can also be used. We apply our method to estimate the effect of Medicare insurance coverage on health care utilization.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":48363,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Applied Econometrics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2023-04-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47953772","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Oil prices uncertainty, endogenous regime switching, and inflation anchoring","authors":"Yoosoon Chang, Ana María Herrera, Elena Pesavento","doi":"10.1002/jae.2978","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/jae.2978","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>Using a novel approach to model regime switching with dynamic feedback and interactions, we extract latent mean and volatility factors in oil price changes. We illustrate how the volatility factor constitutes a useful measure of oil market risk (or oil price uncertainty) for policy makers and analysts as it captures uncertainty not reflected in other economic/financial uncertainty measures. Then, in the context of a VAR, we investigate the role of oil price uncertainty in driving inflation expectations and inflation anchoring. We show that shocks to the mean factor lead to higher expected inflation and inflation disagreement among professional forecasters and households. In contrast, shocks to the volatility factor act as aggregate demand shocks in that they result in lower expected inflation, yet they do increase disagreement about future inflation among professional forecasters and, especially, among households. We also provide econometric evidence suggesting the proposed endogenous volatility switching model can outperform other regime switching models.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":48363,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Applied Econometrics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2023-04-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50137456","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Understanding trend inflation through the lens of the goods and services sectors","authors":"Yunjong Eo, Luis Uzeda, Benjamin Wong","doi":"10.1002/jae.2975","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/jae.2975","url":null,"abstract":"<p>We distinguish between the goods and services sectors in an unobserved components model of U.S. inflation. We find that prior to the early 1990s, both sectors contributed to volatility of aggregate trend inflation, while since then, this has been predominantly driven by the services sector, with the trend in goods inflation being essentially flat. We document that the large reduction in the volatility of the trend for goods inflation has been the most important driver of the decline in the volatility in aggregate trend inflation reported by Stock and Watson (2007). Our results appear robust to COVID-19 inflation developments.</p>","PeriodicalId":48363,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Applied Econometrics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2023-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/jae.2975","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50121096","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Josep Lluís Carrion-i-Silvestre, María Dolores Gadea
{"title":"Testing for multiple level shifts with an integrated or stationary noise component","authors":"Josep Lluís Carrion-i-Silvestre, María Dolores Gadea","doi":"10.1002/jae.2977","DOIUrl":"10.1002/jae.2977","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>The paper analyzes the detection and estimation of multiple level shifts regardless of the order of integration of the time series. We show that it is possible to extend the Bai-Perron methodology (1998) to the I(1) and NI(1) nonstationary cases so that a unified framework to test for the presence of multiple level shifts in a robust way is designed. The finite sample performance of the proposed statistics is carried out, establishing a comparison with other existing approaches in the literature. The paper illustrates the implementation of the statistics focusing on the real exchange rate with time series that either cover a long time period or provide a worldwide analysis. Robust detection of multiple level shifts is of great importance to define the statistical approach that is used to test the purchasing power parity hypothesis.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":48363,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Applied Econometrics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45704315","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"When can we ignore measurement error in the running variable?","authors":"Yingying Dong, Michal Kolesár","doi":"10.1002/jae.2974","DOIUrl":"10.1002/jae.2974","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In many applications of regression discontinuity designs, the running variable used to assign treatment is only observed with error. We show that, provided the observed running variable (i) correctly classifies treatment assignment and (ii) affects the conditional means of potential outcomes smoothly, ignoring the measurement error nonetheless yields an estimate with a causal interpretation: the average treatment effect for units whose observed running variable equals the cutoff. Possibly after doughnut trimming, these assumptions accommodate a variety of settings where support of the measurement error is not too wide. An empirical application illustrates the results for both sharp and fuzzy designs.</p>","PeriodicalId":48363,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Applied Econometrics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/jae.2974","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45165772","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Featured Cover","authors":"Denise Desjardins, Georges Dionne, Yang Lu","doi":"10.1002/jae.2973","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/jae.2973","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The cover image is based on the Research Article <i>Hierarchical random-effects model for the insurance pricing of vehicles belonging to a fleet</i> by Denise Desjardins et al., https://doi.org/10.1002/jae.2949.\u0000\u0000 <figure>\u0000 <div><picture>\u0000 <source></source></picture><p></p>\u0000 </div>\u0000 </figure></p>","PeriodicalId":48363,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Applied Econometrics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/jae.2973","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50133921","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"On event studies and distributed-lags in two-way fixed effects models: Identification, equivalence, and generalization","authors":"Kurt Schmidheiny, Sebastian Siegloch","doi":"10.1002/jae.2971","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/jae.2971","url":null,"abstract":"<p>We discuss three important properties of panel data event study designs. First, assuming constant treatment effects before and/or after some event time, also known as binning, is a natural restriction, which identifies dynamic treatment effects in the absence of never-treated units. Second, event study designs with binned endpoints and distributed-lag models are numerically identical. Third, classic dummy variable event study designs can be generalized to models that account for multiple treatments of different signs and varying intensities. We demonstrate the practical relevance of our methodological points in an application studying the effects of unemployment benefit duration on job search effort.</p>","PeriodicalId":48363,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Applied Econometrics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2023-02-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/jae.2971","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50139599","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Censored density forecasts: Production and evaluation","authors":"James Mitchell, Martin Weale","doi":"10.1002/jae.2972","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/jae.2972","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>This paper develops methods for the production and evaluation of censored density forecasts. The focus is on censored density forecasts that quantify forecast risks in a middle region of the density covering a specified probability and ignore the magnitude but not the frequency of outlying observations. We propose a fixed-point algorithm that fits a potentially skewed and fat-tailed density to the inner observations, acknowledging that the outlying observations may be drawn from a different but unknown distribution. We also introduce a new test for calibration of censored density forecasts. An application using historical forecast errors from the Federal Reserve Board and the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) at the Bank of England suggests that the use of censored density functions to represent the pattern of forecast errors results in much greater parameter stability than do uncensored densities. We illustrate the utility of censored density forecasts when quantifying forecast risks after shocks such as the global financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic and find that these outperform the official forecasts produced by the MPC.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":48363,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Applied Econometrics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2023-02-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50139600","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Revisiting the effect of growing up in a recession on attitudes towards redistribution","authors":"Jan Bietenbeck, Petra Thiemann","doi":"10.1002/jae.2970","DOIUrl":"10.1002/jae.2970","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Giuliano and Spilimbergo (2014) show that individuals who experienced a recession when young are more likely to favor redistribution in the short and long run. We revisit their analysis in three ways. First, we conduct a narrow replication in the General Social Survey and the World Values Survey; we successfully replicate the original results for outcomes that directly measure preferences for redistribution, but the results for other outcomes are less clear-cut. Second, adding recent survey waves yields results similar to the narrow replication. Third, a wide replication in a different dataset (International Social Survey Programme) corroborates the original results.</p>","PeriodicalId":48363,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Applied Econometrics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2023-02-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/jae.2970","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45345110","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}