Bertel Schjerning edits special issue for Journal of Econometrics

Implementation of structural dynamic models is subject to thorough examination when Bertel Schjerning and his fellow editors, Michael Keane, Dennis Kristensen, Fedor Iskhakov curate and present state of the art results from world renown peers in Journal of Econometrics’ special issue Volume 223, issue 2.

The papers in the special issue can roughly be divided into two groups:

The first group contains methodological contributions where either new structural models or new methods for analyzing them are developed.

The second group contains novel applications of existing models and/or methods with emphasis on their practical implementation and usages in answering policy-relevant questions.

Taken as a whole, the special issue provides the reader with a good overview of state-of-the-art methods and their implementations for structural dynamic models in economics.

The reader gets to dig into, for instance, Iskhakov and Keane’s evaluation of the effects of income taxes and means tested safety-net pensions on labor supply using a structurally estimated life-cycle model; the founding father of the Hotz-Miller inversion Robert Miller and his co-authors develop novel identification and estimation results for the distribution of valuations in ascending auctions where an indeterminate number of bidders have an unknown number of bidding opportunities; and Aguirregabiria, the leading expert in structural estimation and dynamic games, and his co-authors analyze which parameters can be identified in a class of structural dynamic discrete choice models with fixed effects.

This special issue has been long underway. It is the outcome of the conference on ‘‘Implementation of Structural Dynamic Models that was held at University College 29–30 August 2017 and brought together researchers from applied microeconomics, computational economics and econometrics who work on structural dynamic models. It provided a forum at which new structural models with applications and new numerical/econometric methods for their implementation were presented and discussed. To disseminate the ideas and results presented at the conference, participants were invited to submit papers to this special issue on the same topic.

Another spill-off from the conference series is Econometric Society Summer School in dynamic Structural Econometrics. This year’s summer school will take place in Bonn in Germany in August 16-22.