CEMFI

About: CEMFI is a based out in . It is known for research contribution in the topics: Unemployment & Estimator. The organization has 71 authors who have published 499 publications receiving 46553 citations. The organization is also known as: Center for Monetary and Financial Studies.

The Effects of Short-Term Rental Regulations: Evidence From the City of Santa Monica

Abstract: This paper studies the impacts of a specific regulation restricting short-term rental activity, the Home-Sharing Ordinance, adopted in the city of Santa Monica in May of 2015. It mainly focuses on carefully estimating how the ordinance has affected the number of housing units operating on Airbnb’s platform. Using a dataset of Airbnb listings in the area surrounding the city of Los Angeles, I find that the ordinance has reduced the number of entire homes listed on Airbnb in Santa Monica by approximately 61%. I also study the impacts of this regulation on the long-term rental market and I find no evidence of a significant effect of the ordinance on residential rents in Santa Monica. Lastly, I provide suggestive evidence of the extent to which the policy under study has had any effect on housing reallocation in the city.

Optimal Life Cycle Unemployment Insurance

Abstract: We argue that US welfare would rise if unemployment insurance were increased for younger and decreased for older workers. This is because the young tend to lack the means to smooth consumption during unemployment and want jobs to accumulate high-return human capital. So unemployment insurance is most valuable to them, while moral hazard is mild. By calibrating a life cycle model with unemployment risk and endogenous search effort, we find that allowing unemployment replacement rates to decline with age yields sizeable welfare gains to US workers.

Effects of Motorcycle Helmet Laws on Fatalities’ Prevention: An Impact Evaluation

Abstract: Simultaneity bias complicates the estimation of the causal effect of motorcycle helmet usage on fatalities. We overcome this obstacle by exploiting an exogenous variation in the enforcement of the motorcycle helmet usage law between two municipalities in Uruguay. We show evidence of a dramatic increase in helmet usage in one municipality after the law was enforced. In just one month, usage increased from less than 10% to more than 90%. Our difference in difference estimates show that helmet usage laws are associated with a significant decrease in injuries and fatalities.

Sequential Estimation of Shape Parameters in Multivariate Dynamic Models

Abstract: Sequential maximum likelihood and GMM estimators of distributional parameters obtained from the standardised innovations of multivariate conditionally heteroskedastic dynamic regression models evaluated at Gaussian PML estimators preserve the consistency of mean and variance parameters while allowing for realistic distributions. We assess the efficiency of those estimators, and obtain moment conditions leading to sequential estimators as efficient as their joint maximum likelihood counterparts. We also obtain standard errors for the quantiles required in VaR and CoVaR calculations, and analyse the effects on these measures of distributional misspecification. Finally, we illustrate the small sample performance of these procedures through Monte Carlo simulations.

Marriage and Health: Selection, Protection, and Assortative Mating

Abstract: Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) and the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS), we analyze the health gap between married and unmarried individuals of working-age. Controlling for observables, we find a gap that peaks at 10 percentage points at ages 55-59. If we allow for unobserved heterogeneity in innate health (permanent and age-dependent), potentially correlated with timing and likelihood of marriage, we find that the effect of marriage on health disappears below age 40, while about 5 percentage points difference between married and unmarried individuals remains at older (55-59) ages. This indicates that the observed gap is mainly driven by selection into marriage at younger ages, but there might be a protective effect of marriage at older ages. Exploring the mechanisms behind this result, we find that better innate health is associated with a higher probability of marriage and a lower probability of divorce, and there is strong assortative mating among couples by innate health. We also find that married individuals are more likely to have a healthier behavior compared to unmarried ones. Finally, we find that health insurance is critical for the beneficial effect of marriage.