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--- - |2 What is it for two people to think of something under the same mode of presentation (MOP)? This has seemed a difficult question for “atomistic” theories such as the Mental Files approach or the Language of Thought hypothesis. Here I propose a simple answer. I first argue that, by parallel with the synchronic intrapersonal case, the sharing of a MOP should involve epistemic transparency between the token thoughts of the two thinkers. I then explain how shared words help bring about this transparency. Finally, I show how the account can deal with MOPs expressed using demonstratives and indexicals. - Mind & Language, EarlyView.

--- - |2 Intellectualists about knowledge‐how argue that knowing how to do something is knowing the content of a proposition (i.e., a fact). An important component of this view is the idea that propositional knowledge is translated into behavior when it is presented to the mind in a peculiarly practical way. Until recently, however, intellectualists have not said much about what it means for propositional knowledge to be entertained under thought's practical guise. Carlotta Pavese fills this gap in the intellectualist view by modeling practical modes of thought after Fregean senses. In this paper, I take up her model and the presuppositions it is built upon, arguing that her view of practical thought is not positioned to account for much of what human agents are able to do. - Mind & Language, EarlyView.

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--- - |2 Is it possible to deliberate consciously during a 1‐min‐per‐player chess game? I argue that, in contrast to views of the philosophers Hubert Dreyfus and John McDowell, even 1‐min‐per‐player chess games involve conscious thought and deliberation. In making my case, I rely on experimental results from two small‐scale studies I conducted on chess players, chess players' first‐person reports, and theoretical considerations that distinguish automatic skills from consciously controlled skills. This work bolsters Yu‐Hsuan Chang and David Lane's 2016 study suggesting that simultaneous chess exhibitions and speed chess allow time for calculation. It also aims to inspire future, larger‐scale studies investigating the role of declarative thought in 1‐min‐per‐player games. - Mind & Language, EarlyView.

--- - |2 The nature of attention has been the topic of a lively research programme in psychology for over a century. But there is widespread agreement that none of the theories on offer manage to fully capture the nature of attention. Recently, philosophers have become interested in the debate again after a prolonged period of neglect. This paper contributes to the project of explaining the nature of attention. It starts off by critically examining Christopher Mole's prominent “adverbial” account of attention, which traces the failure of extant psychological theories to their assumption that attending is a kind of process. It then defends an alternative, process‐based view of the metaphysics of attention, on which attention is understood as an activity and not, as psychologists seem to implicitly assume, an accomplishment. The entrenched distinction between accomplishments and activities is shown to shed new light on the metaphysics of attention. It also provides a novel diagnosis of the empirical state of play. - Mind & Language, EarlyView.

--- - |2 Consider the following sentence: “Mary meditated on the sentence ‘Bill is a good friend’ and concluded that he was a good friend.” It is standardly assumed that in sentences of this sort, containing so‐called “closed” quotations, the expressions occurring between quotation marks are mentioned and do not take their ordinary referents. The quoted NP “Bill” refers, if anything, to the name ‘Bill,’ not to the individual Bill. At the same time, the pronoun “he,” apparently anaphoric on quoted “Bill,” refers to the individual Bill. The case seems thus to invalidate the intuitive principle that pronouns anaphoric on referential expressions inherit their reference from their antecedents. The paper formulates the argument, argues that sentences exhibiting the described pattern do not constitute evidence against the intuitive principle, and proposes an alternative account of the anaphoric relation involved. - Mind & Language, EarlyView.

--- - |2 The idea that attention is necessary for consciousness (the “Necessity Thesis”) is frequently advocated by philosophers and psychologists alike. Experiments involving inattentional and change blindness are thought to support the Necessity Thesis, but they do so only if subjects failing to notice the target stimulus are also not conscious of it. This article uses commonsense phenomenological observations supplemented with empirical data to argue that some subjects failing to notice the target stimulus nonetheless experience its color. Since subjects not noticing the target are commonly assumed to be not attending to it, these scenarios would be instances of consciousness without attention: instead of inattentional and change blindness supporting the Necessity Thesis, they would present counterexamples to it. - Mind & Language, EarlyView.

--- - |2 Lies are typically defined as believed falsehoods asserted with the intention of deceiving the hearer. A particularly problematic case for this definition is that of false implicatures. These are prototypically cases where the proposition expressed by the speaker's utterance is true, yet an implicature conveyed by this proposition in context is false. However, implicature is a diverse category and whether a blanket statement such as “false implicatures are lies,” as some have argued can account for all of them is open to investigation. We present an experimental investigation of whether naïve participants define different types of implicatures as lies. Our results show that only a couple of types of implicatures were strongly rated as lies by participants. These results suggest that participants distinguish between different types of communicated meanings on linguistic grounds, contributing both to the literature on lying, as well as to theoretical discussions of how different types of meaning are communicated. - Mind & Language, EarlyView.

--- - |2 Mercier and Sperber illuminate many aspects of reasoning and rationality, providing refreshing and thoughtful analysis and elegant and well‐researched illustrations. They make a good case that reasoning should be viewed as a type of intuition, rather than a separate cognitive process or system. Yet questions remain. In what sense, if any, is reasoning a “module?” What is the link between rationality within an individual and rationality defined through the interaction between individuals? Formal theories of rationality, from logic, probability theory and game theory, while not the focus of Mercier and Sperber's book, may help clarify this latter question. - Mind & Language, EarlyView.

--- - |2 The standard view of the function of reason is that it emerged to enable individuals to make better judgements and choices. Once individuals could think better, and once we had suitable communicative tools, individual reasoning acquired a public face; we reasoned together as well as privately, in our own mind. Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber argue that this gets the story the wrong way around: reasoning evolved for public purposes: to persuade, negotiate, assess. Once it was established publically, perhaps it acquired a private function too. With the exception of a few minor complaints, this evolutionary case is well made. However, Mercier and Sperber embed their evolutionary case within a modular view of the mind and suggest a modular view of public reasoning itself. While I find the evolutionary case persuasive, I am sceptical of the cognitive science framework. - Mind & Language, EarlyView.

--- - |2 In their reviews, Chater and Oaksford, Dutilh Novaes, and Sterelny are critical of our modularist approach to reason. In this response, we clarify our claim that reason is one of many cognitive modules that produce intuitive inferences each in its domain; the reason module producing intuitions about reasons. We argue that in‐principle objections to the idea of massive modularity based on Fodor's peculiar approach are not effective against other interpretations that have led to insightful uses of the notion in psychology and biology. We explain how the reason module evaluates reasons on the basis of their metacognitive properties. We show how the module fulfils a social function, that of producing reasons to justify oneself and convince others and of evaluating the reasons others produce to convince us. - Mind & Language, EarlyView.

--- - |2 In The Enigma of Reason, Mercier and Sperber (M&S) present and defend their interactionist account of reason. In this piece, I discuss briefly the points of agreement between M&S and myself and, more extensively, the points of disagreement, most of which pertain to details of the evolutionary components of their account. I discuss in particular the purported modular nature of reason; their account of myside bias as an optimum/adaptation; and the claim that reason thus construed must be an individual‐level and not a group‐level adaptation. In the final section, I offer brief considerations on an alternative account of reasoning, where the focus is on how sociocultural environments may tune the social production and evaluation of arguments. - Mind & Language, EarlyView.

--- - |2 The cognitive phenomenology thesis claims that “there is something it is like” to have cognitive states such as believing, desiring, hoping, attending, and so on. In support of this idea, Goldman claimed that the tip‐of‐the‐tongue phenomenon can be considered as a clear‐cut instance of nonsensory cognitive phenomenology. This paper reviews Goldman's proposal and assesses whether the tip‐of‐the‐tongue and other metacognitive feelings actually constitute an instance of cognitive phenomenology. The paper will show that psychological data cast doubt on the idea that the tip‐of‐the‐tongue and other metacognitive feelings are clear‐cut instances of cognitive phenomenology. - Mind & Language, EarlyView.

--- - |2 This is a reminiscence and short biographical sketch of the late philosopher and cognitive scientist Jerry Fodor. It includes a summary of his main proposals about the mind: his “Language of Thought” hypothesis; his rejection of analyticity and conceptual role semantics; his “mad dog nativism”; his proposal of mental modules and—by contrast—his skepticism about a computational theory of central cognition; his anti‐reductionist, but still physicalist, views about psychology; and, lastly, his attacks on selectionism. I conclude with some discussion of his idiosyncratic style and of his aesthetic and other interests. An appendix provides some memorable quotes. - Mind & Language, Volume 33, Issue 4, Page 321-341, September 2018.

--- - |2 I outline three conceptions of seeing that a creature might possess: “the headlamp conception,” which involves an understanding of the causal connections between gazing at an object, certain mental states, and behavior; “the stage lights conception,” which involves an understanding of the selective nature of visual attention; and seeing‐as. I argue that infants and various nonhumans possess the headlamp conception. There is also evidence that chimpanzees and 3‐year‐old children have some grasp of seeing‐as. However, due to a dearth of studies, there is no evidence that infants or nonhumans possess the stage lights conception of seeing. I outline the kinds of experiments that are needed, and what we stand to learn about the evolution and development of perspective taking. - Mind & Language, EarlyView.

--- - |2 Recent work on the side‐effect effect has shown that subjects' intentionality judgments are influenced by moral evaluations. In six experiments, we tested four different candidates for the cognitive foundation derived from prominent explanatory accounts (prescriptiveness, [un‐]expectedness, blame and a shift in default attitudes) against each other in three steps. First, Study 1 showed that the effect even extends to certain descriptive norms. Second, Studies 2–5 investigated the candidates more directly. Results reveal that intentionality judgments could best be explained by underlying shifts in default attitudes. Third, Study 6 experimentally manipulated this default attitude, leading to the predicted change in intentionality judgments. - Mind & Language, EarlyView.

--- - |2 It is often possible to know what a speaker intends to communicate without knowing what they intend to express. In such cases, speakers need not intend to express anything at all. Stanley and Szabó's influential survey of possible analysis of quantifier domain restriction is, therefore, incomplete and the arguments made by Clapp and Buchanan against Truth Conditional Compositionality and propositional speaker‐meaning are flawed. Two theories should not always be viewed as incompatible when they associate the same utterance with different propositions, as there may be many ways to interpret speakers that are compatible with their intentions. - Mind & Language, EarlyView.

--- - |2 Since at least Hume and Kant, philosophers working on the nature of aesthetic judgment have generally agreed that common sense does not treat aesthetic judgments in the same way as typical expressions of subjective preferences—rather, it endows them with intersubjective validity, the property of being right or wrong regardless of disagreement. Moreover, this apparent intersubjective validity has been taken to constitute one of the main explananda for philosophical accounts of aesthetic judgment. But is it really the case that most people spontaneously treat aesthetic judgments as having intersubjective validity? In this paper, we report the results of a cross‐cultural study with over 2,000 respondents spanning 19 countries. Despite significant geographical variations, these results suggest that most people do not treat their own aesthetic judgments as having intersubjective validity. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for theories of aesthetic judgment and the purpose of aesthetics in general. - Mind & Language, EarlyView.

--- - |2 A Bayesian mind is, at its core, a rational mind. Bayesianism is thus well‐suited to predict and explain mental processes that best exemplify our ability to be rational. However, evidence from belief acquisition and change appears to show that we do not acquire and update information in a Bayesian way. Instead, the principles of belief acquisition and updating seem grounded in maintaining a psychological immune system rather than in approximating a Bayesian processor. - Mind & Language, EarlyView.

--- - |2 The paper evaluates a well‐known argument for a self from episodic memories—that remembering that I did something or thought something involves experiencing the identity of my present self with the past doer or thinker. Shaun Nichols argues that although it phenomenologically appears to be the case that we are identical with the past self, no metaphysical conclusion can be drawn from the phenomenology. I draw on literature from contemporary psychology and Buddhist resources to arrive at a more radical conclusion: that there is no phenomenological sense of identity with a past self; the sense of self in episodic memory depends on narrative construction of the self. - Mind & Language, EarlyView.

--- - |2 Embodied cognition emphasizes the importance of the body to cognition, but what is the nature of this importance? For some advocates, the body provides a computational resource within the context of a larger cognitive system. For others, the body constrains cognition, such that differently embodied organisms will differ cognitively as well. I examine these distinct conceptions of embodiment, defending the greater interest of the second. I argue as well that judgments of the body's significance in cognition do not, as contestants on both sides of the debate often insist, depend on showing the body to be a constituent in cognition. - Mind & Language, EarlyView.

--- - |2 Previous experimental studies on epistemic contextualism have, for the most part, not been designed to distinguish between contextualism and one of its main competing theories, subject‐sensitive invariantism (SSI). In this paper, we present a “third‐person” experimental design that is needed to provide evidence that would support contextualism over SSI, and we then present our results using this design. Our results not only provide crucial support for contextualism over SSI, but also buck the general trend of failing to detect the kind of contextual effect that the epistemic contextualism relies upon. - Mind & Language, EarlyView.

--- - |2 It has been argued that implicit biases are operative in philosophy and lead to significant epistemic costs in the field. Philosophers working on this issue have focused mainly on implicit gender and race biases. They have overlooked ideological bias, which targets political orientations. Psychologists have found ideological bias in their field and have argued that it has negative epistemic effects on scientific research. I relate this debate to the field of philosophy and argue that if, as some studies suggest, the same bias also exists in philosophy then it will lead to hitherto unrecognised epistemic hazards in the field. Furthermore, the bias is epistemically different from the more familiar biases in respects that are important for epistemology, ethics, and metaphilosophy. - Mind & Language, EarlyView.

--- - |2 Non‐human animal evidence is frequently invoked in debates in cognitive science. Here, I critically assess one use of such evidence in the form of the “argument from animals,” a prominent positive argument for nativism, which roughly states that non‐human cognitive development is largely nativist, and thus human cognitive development is most likely largely nativist too. I offer a number of reasons to reject this argument, and in doing so derive some important broader lessons concerning the appropriate role of non‐human animal evidence in a science of the human mind. - Mind & Language, EarlyView.

--- - |2 The debate regarding the nature of joint action has come to a stalemate due to a dependence on intuitional methods. Normativists, such as Margaret Gilbert, argue that action‐relative normative relations are inherent in joint action, while non‐normativists, such as Michael Bratman, claim that there are minimal cases of joint action without normative relations. In this work, we describe the first experimental examinations of these intuitions, and report the results of six studies that weigh in favor of the normativist paradigm. Philosophical ramifications and further extensions of this work are then discussed. - Mind & Language, EarlyView.

--- - |2 How do children learn the meanings of propositional attitude verbs? We argue that children use information contained in both syntactic distribution and pragmatic function to zero in on the appropriate meanings. Specifically, we identify a potentially universal link between semantic subclasses of attitude verbs, their syntactic distribution and the kinds of indirect speech acts they can be used to perform. As a result, children can use the syntax as evidence about the meaning, which in turn constrains the kinds of pragmatic enrichments they do and do not make in understanding these verbs in conversation. - Mind & Language, EarlyView.

--- - |2 “I”‐thought is often taken to have a special cognitive significance, with “I” symbolising a subjective way of thinking about oneself that is inapt for communication. In this paper I argue that the way one thinks of oneself in “I”‐thought is immaterial to the meaning of “I,” for in general the psychological role associated with a referential expression is separable from its meaning. With respect to “I,” I suggest that its meaning consists in an interpersonal way of fixing its reference in a context, which is accessible to the speaker and the hearer. Consequently, “I” would have a dual cognitive significance. - Mind & Language, EarlyView.

--- - |2 Many philosophers have claimed that the folk endorse moral universalism. But while some empirical evidence supports the claim that the folk endorse moral universalism, this work has uncovered intra‐domain differences in folk judgments of moral universalism. In light of all this, our question is: why do the folk endorse moral universalism? Our hypothesis is that folk judgments of moral universalism are generated in part by a desire to punish. We present evidence supporting this across three studies. On the basis of this, we argue for a debunking explanation of folk judgments of moral universalism. - Mind & Language, EarlyView.

--- - |2 Several theories, which attempt to give an account of cumulative culture, emphasize the importance of high‐fidelity transmission mechanisms as central to human learning. These high‐fidelity transmission mechanisms are thought to account for the ratchet effect, that is, the capacity to inherit modified or improved knowledge and skills rather than having to develop one's skills from the ground up via individual learning. In this capacity, imitation and teaching have been thought to occupy a special place in the explanation of cumulative culture because they are both thought to function as high‐fidelity transmission mechanisms. In contrast to this standard view, I will argue that imitation and teaching are not both best construed as primarily high‐fidelity transmission mechanisms. Rather, I will argue that though both can contribute to the high‐fidelity transmission of information, imitation and teaching make two distinct contributions to cumulative culture. I will claim that imitation functions primarily as a high‐fidelity transmission mechanism while teaching is primarily responsible for the innovation and creativity characteristic of cumulative culture. - Mind & Language, Volume 33, Issue 4, Page 355-377, September 2018.

--- - |2 This article focuses on the question of the function of imitation and whether current accounts of imitative function are consistent with our knowledge about imitation's origins. We first review theories of imitative origin concluding that empirical evidence suggests that imitation arises from domain‐general learning mechanisms. Next, we lay out a selective account of function that allows normative functions to be ascribed to learned behaviours. We then describe and review four accounts of the function of imitation before evaluating the relationship between the claim that imitation arises out of domain‐general learning mechanisms and theories of the function of imitation. - Mind & Language, Volume 33, Issue 4, Page 378-396, September 2018.

--- - |2 Most views of agency take acting for reasons (whether explanatory or justifying) to be an important hallmark of the capacity for agency. The problem, however, is that the standard analysis of what it is to act in light of reasons is not sufficiently fine grained to accommodate what we will argue are the myriad types of ways that agents can do so. We suggest that a full account of acting for reasons must also recognize the relationship that agents have with their reasons. We focus on two types of relationships. The first is the traditional case, where agents act in light of reasons that they take to be their own and that they endorse. We describe this as possessing an Endorsement Relationship with one's reasons. A second way of relating to reasons is what we will describe as possessing a Directed Relationship with one's reasons. This includes cases in which agents' actions are the product of reasons but toward which agents do not have an Endorsement Relationship. The Endorsement Relationship is uncontroversial. In this paper, we defend the existence and importance of the Directed Relationship. We show that it is a genuine but overlooked way of relating to, and thereby acting for, reasons. - Mind & Language, EarlyView.

--- - |2 Number morphology (e.g., singular vs. plural) is a part of the grammar that captures numerical information. Some languages have morphological Number values, which express few (paucal), two (dual), three (trial) and sometimes (possibly) four (quadral). Interestingly, the limit of the attested morphological Number values matches the limit of non‐verbal numerical cognition. The latter is based on two systems, one estimating approximate numerosities and the other computing exact numerosities up to three or four. We compared the literature on non‐verbal number systems with data on Number morphology from 218 languages. Our observations suggest that non‐verbal numerical cognition is reflected as a core part of language. - Mind & Language, EarlyView.

--- - |2 We present an investigation of the ways in which speakers' subjective perspectives are likely to affect the meaning of gradable adjectives like tall or heavy. We present the results of a study showing that people tend to use themselves as a yardstick when ascribing these adjectives to human figures of varied measurements: subjects' height and weight requirements for applying tall and heavy are found to be positively correlated with their personal measurements. We draw more general lessons regarding the definition of subjectivity and the ways in which a standard of comparison and a significant deviation from that standard are specified. - Mind & Language, EarlyView.

--- - |2 Imitation research has focused on turn‐taking contexts in which one person acts and one person then copies that action. However, people also imitate when engaging in joint actions, where two or more people coordinate their actions in space and time in order to achieve a shared goal. We discuss how the various constraints imposed by joint action modulate imitation, and the close links between perception and action that form the basis of this phenomenon. We also explore how understanding imitation in the context of joint action yields new insights into cultural phenomena such as teaching and innovation. - Mind & Language, Volume 33, Issue 4, Page 342-354, September 2018.

--- - |2 It is widely supposed that if there is to be a plausible connection between the truth of a de re attitude report about a subject and that subject's possession of a singular thought, then “acquaintance”‐style requirements on singular thought must be rejected. I show that this belief rests on poorly motivated claims about how we talk about the attitudes. I offer a framework for propositional attitude reports, which provides both attractive solutions to recalcitrant puzzle cases and the key to preserving acquaintance constraints. The upshot is that there is an independently motivated response to the principal argument against acquaintance. - Mind & Language, Volume 33, Issue 4, Page 415-437, September 2018.

--- - |2 Do you know you are not being massively deceived by an evil demon? That is a familiar skeptical challenge. Less familiar is this question: How do you have a conception of knowledge on which the evil demon constitutes a prima facie challenge? Recently several philosophers have suggested that our responses to skeptical scenarios can be explained in terms of heuristics and biases. We offer an alternative explanation, based in learning theory. We argue that, given the evidence available to the learner, it would be rational for the learner to infer an infallibilist conception of knowledge. - Mind & Language, Volume 33, Issue 4, Page 397-414, September 2018.

With cointegration tests often being oversized under time‐varying error variance, it is possible, if not likely, to confuse error variance non‐stationarity with cointegration. This paper takes an instrumental variable (IV) approach to establish individual‐unit test statistics for no cointegration that are robust to variance non‐stationarity. The sign of a fitted departure from long‐run equilibrium is used as an instrument when estimating an error‐correction model. The resulting IV‐based test is shown to follow a chi‐square limiting null distribution irrespective of the variance pattern of the data‐generating process. In spite of this, the test proposed here has, unlike previous work relying on instrumental variables, competitive local power against sequences of local alternatives in 1/T‐neighbourhoods of the null. The standard limiting null distribution motivates, using the single‐unit tests in a multiple testing approach for cointegration in multi‐country data sets by combining P‐values from individual units. Simulations suggest good performance of the single‐unit and multiple testing procedures under various plausible designs of cross‐sectional correlation and cross‐unit cointegration in the data. An application to the equilibrium relationship between short‐ and long‐term interest rates illustrates the dramatic differences between results of robust and non‐robust tests.

We propose imposing data‐driven identification constraints to alleviate the multimodality problem arising in the estimation of poorly identified dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models under non‐informative prior distributions. We also devise an iterative procedure based on the posterior density of the parameters for finding these constraints. An empirical application to the Smets and Wouters () model demonstrates the properties of the estimation method, and shows how the problem of multimodal posterior distributions caused by parameter redundancy is eliminated by identification constraints. Out‐of‐sample forecast comparisons as well as Bayes factors lend support to the constrained model.

This article reports on findings of an ethnographically oriented multiple case study research study on teenagers’ everyday literacy practices in English as a foreign language in contemporary Greece. Drawing on new literacy studies, discourse analysis, and ethnography, the study extended over a period of 18 months and employed multiple data collection tools (interviews, field notes, literacy diaries, in‐home observations, documents, photographs) to provide an emic account of the literacy practices in English of 15 teenagers from varied backgrounds living in Athens, Greece. Contrary to conventional understandings of home and school as mutually exclusive domains and of teenagers’ literacy practices across these spaces as disconnected and mismatched, the findings presented in this article suggest that young people's English literacy practices are constituted by flows between formal and informal sites and thus cannot be easily disentangled into separable school and home practices. Overall, the article foregrounds a more subtle understanding of the relationship between school and out‐of‐school literacy and illustrates the need to move beyond traditional understandings of English language literacy as a static set of cognitive skills exclusively encountered and acquired in bounded contexts—predominantly educational ones.

There is no abstract available for this paper.

This paper provides a feasible approach to estimation and forecasting of multiple structural breaks for vector autoregressions and other multivariate models. Owing to conjugate prior assumptions we obtain a very efficient sampler for the regime allocation variable. A new hierarchical prior is introduced to allow for learning over different structural breaks. The model is extended to independent breaks in regression coefficients and the volatility parameters. Two empirical applications show the improvements the model has over benchmarks. In a macro application with seven variables we empirically demonstrate the benefits from moving from a multivariate structural break model to a set of univariate structural break models to account for heterogeneous break patterns across data series.

We use multivariate unobserved components models to estimate trend and cyclical components in gross domestic product (GDP), credit volumes, and house prices for the USA and the five largest European economies. With the exception of Germany, we find large and long cycles in credit and house prices, which are highly correlated with a medium‐term component in GDP cycles. Differences across countries in the length and size of cycles appear to be related to the properties of national housing markets. The precision of pseudo real‐time estimates of credit and house price cycles is roughly comparable to that of GDP cycles.

This paper proposes a class of models that jointly model returns and ex post variance measures under a Markov switching framework. Both univariate and multivariate return versions of the model are introduced. Estimation can be conducted under a fixed dimension state space or an infinite one. The proposed models can be seen as nonlinear common factor models subject to Markov switching and are able to exploit the information content in both returns and ex post volatility measures. Applications to equity returns compare the proposed models to existing alternatives. The empirical results show that the joint models improve density forecasts for returns and point predictions of return variance. Using the information in ex post volatility measures can increase the precision of parameter estimates, sharpen the inference on the latent state variable, and improve portfolio decisions.

We develop a theory of parent‐child relations that rationalizes the choice between alternative parenting styles (as set out in Baumrind, 1967). Parents maximize an objective function that combines Beckerian altruism and paternalism towards children. They can affect their children's choices via two channels: either by influencing children's preferences or by imposing direct restrictions on their choice sets. Different parenting styles (authoritarian, authoritative, and permissive) emerge as equilibrium outcomes and are affected both by parental preferences and by the socioeconomic environment. Parenting style, in turn, feeds back into the children's welfare and economic success. The theory is consistent with the decline of authoritarian parenting observed in industrialized countries and with the greater prevalence of more permissive parenting in countries characterized by low inequality.

A growing number of school districts use centralized assignment mechanisms to allocate school seats in a manner that reflects student preferences and school priorities. Many of these assignment schemes use lotteries to ration seats when schools are oversubscribed. The resulting random assignment opens the door to credible quasi‐experimental research designs for the evaluation of school effectiveness. Yet the question of how best to separate the lottery‐generated randomization integral to such designs from non‐random preferences and priorities remains open. This paper develops easily‐implemented empirical strategies that fully exploit the random assignment embedded in a wide class of mechanisms, while also revealing why seats are randomized at one school but not another. We use these methods to evaluate charter schools in Denver, one of a growing number of districts that combine charter and traditional public schools in a unified assignment system. The resulting estimates show large achievement gains from charter school attendance. Our approach generates efficiency gains over ad hoc methods, such as those that focus on schools ranked first, while also identifying a more representative average causal effect. We also show how to use centralized assignment mechanisms to identify causal effects in models with multiple school sectors.

We explore the set of preferences defined over temporal lotteries in an infinite horizon setting. We provide utility representations for all preferences that are both recursive and monotone. Our results indicate that the class of monotone recursive preferences includes Uzawa–Epstein preferences and risk‐sensitive preferences, but leaves aside several of the recursive models suggested by Epstein and Zin (1989) and Weil (1990). Our representation result is derived in great generality using Lundberg's (1982, 1985) work on functional equations.

In this paper, we prove the existence of recursive equilibria in a dynamic stochastic model with infinitely lived heterogeneous agents, several commodities, and general inter‐ and intratemporal production. We illustrate the usefulness of our result by providing sufficient conditions for the existence of recursive equilibria in heterogeneous agent versions of both the Lucas asset pricing model and the neoclassical stochastic growth model.

Stochastic discount factor (SDF) processes in dynamic economies admit a permanent‐transitory decomposition in which the permanent component characterizes pricing over long investment horizons. This paper introduces an empirical framework to analyze the permanent‐transitory decomposition of SDF processes. Specifically, we show how to estimate nonparametrically the solution to the Perron–Frobenius eigenfunction problem of Hansen and Scheinkman, 2009. Our empirical framework allows researchers to (i) construct time series of the estimated permanent and transitory components and (ii) estimate the yield and the change of measure which characterize pricing over long investment horizons. We also introduce nonparametric estimators of the continuation value function in a class of models with recursive preferences by reinterpreting the value function recursion as a nonlinear Perron–Frobenius problem. We establish consistency and convergence rates of the eigenfunction estimators and asymptotic normality of the eigenvalue estimator and estimators of related functionals. As an application, we study an economy where the representative agent is endowed with recursive preferences, allowing for general (nonlinear) consumption and earnings growth dynamics.

We develop a theory that rationalizes the use of a dominant unit of account in an economy. Agents enter into non‐contingent contracts with a variety of business partners. Trade unfolds sequentially in credit chains and is subject to random matching. By using a dominant unit of account, agents can lower their exposure to relative price risk, avoid costly default, and create more total surplus. We discuss conditions under which it is optimal to adopt circulating government paper as the dominant unit of account, and the optimal choice of “currency areas” when there is variation in the intensity of trade within and across regions.

We present a flexible and scalable method for computing global solutions of high‐dimensional stochastic dynamic models. Within a time iteration or value function iteration setup, we interpolate functions using an adaptive sparse grid algorithm. With increasing dimensions, sparse grids grow much more slowly than standard tensor product grids. Moreover, adaptivity adds a second layer of sparsity, as grid points are added only where they are most needed, for instance, in regions with steep gradients or at nondifferentiabilities. To further speed up the solution process, our implementation is fully hybrid parallel, combining distributed and shared memory parallelization paradigms, and thus permits an efficient use of high‐performance computing architectures. To demonstrate the broad applicability of our method, we solve two very different types of dynamic models: first, high‐dimensional international real business cycle models with capital adjustment costs and irreversible investment; second, multiproduct menu‐cost models with temporary sales and economies of scope in price setting.