The starting point of this course is a self-contained introduction to Bayesian estimation and inference. We proceed with the Bayesian estimation of reduced-form vector autoregressions, discussing popular families of prior distributions and how to sample from the resulting posterior distributions. Next, we move from reduced-form to structural VARs. We show how Bayesian inference can be implemented...
Life-course scholarship has documented the important role of educational aspirations in status attainment processes but has also revealed that parent-child mismatches in educational aspirations may negatively affect child development. However, it is unclear how parent-child mismatches in educational aspirations evolve over time. Here, we examine (1) the prevalence of mismatching aspirations across ...
This paper examines the “right” geographic definition of relevant markets by analyzing how excise tax pass-through varies with local competition in the retail gasoline market of a large metropolitan city. Using a natural experiment from three unanticipated and exogenous fuel tax hikes and detailed station-level price data, we show that average pass-through is invariant to the number of nearby competitors ...
We examine the impact of the war in Ukraine on long-term contracts in energy markets. We find that traded contract volumes fall by 65 percent in the first months of the war. A collapse in bilateral trading contributes most to this decline. To protect themselves from price shocks, firms increasingly turned to long-term contracts already before the war. In sum, our results show that the market continued ...
