Research

My Google Scholar page is here.

Journal articles

Applied microeconomics

1. Cook, J., Newberger, N., and S. Smalling (2020): "The spread of social distancing," Economics Letters, 196.

   • Op-ed about this article in The Hill

2. Cook, J., Kowaleski, Z., Minnis, M., Sutherland, A., and K. Zehms (2020): "Auditors are known by the companies they keep," Journal of Accounting and Economics, 70(1).

   • Article in Chicago Business Review "To find an honest stockbroker, check out the auditor"

3. Cook, J. A. and F. Gale (2019): "Using food prices and consumption to examine Chinese cost of living," Pacific Economic Review, 24(1), p 3-26. (lead article)

   • Urban and rural indices

4. Cook, J. A. (2014): "The effect of firm-level productivity on exchange rate pass-through," Economics Letters, 122(1), p 27-30.

   • The working paper version (with the online appendix) is available here

Applied econometrics

5. Cook, J. (2022): "Sample-selection-adjusted random forests," International Journal of Data Science and Analytics, 14, p 375–388.

   • Code is available here

6. Cook, J., Lee, J. S., and N. Newberger (2021): "On identification and estimation of Heckman models," Stata Journal, 21(4), p 972-998.

7. Chan, J. Y. and J. A. Cook (2020): "Inferring Zambia's HIV prevalence from a selected sample," Applied Economics, 52(39), p 4236-4249.

8. Cook, J. and S. Siddiqui (2020): "Random forests and selected samples," Bulletin of Economic Research, 72(3), p 272-287.

9. Cook, J. (2017): "Estimating the portion of technical analysts in a market," Applied Economics, 49(41), p 4127-4137.

   • Data

Evaluating predictions

10. Cook, J. and V. Ramadas (2020): "When to consult precision-recall curves," Stata Journal, 20(1), p 131-148.

11. Cook, J. and A. Rajbhandari (2018): "heckroccurve: ROC curves for selected samples," Stata Journal, 18(1), p 174-183.

12. Cook, J. A. (2017): "ROC curves and nonrandom data," Pattern Recognition Letters, 85(1), p 35-41.

1. • The Stata command heckroc, which implements the procedure from this paper, is now on SSC (ssc install heckroc).

Government publications

1. Gale, F., Yang, Z., and J. Cook. (2013): “China’s vegetable exports peak as attention shifts to domestic market.” U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, Situation and Outlook VGS-353-SA3.

Work in progress

Wage and sensitivity to trade conditions

A heterogeneous-firm trade model with endogenous markups predicts that wage affects an exporter's sensitivity to trade conditions. When trade costs increase, the extensive margin of trade is more sensitive for low-wage exporters than high-wage exporters, but the intensive margin is less sensitive. This model explains the large impact of Chinese exports on US manufacturing. We present empirical evidence in support of this model by testing its implications for the sensitivity of trade volume and exchange rate pass-through.