Improving The Efficiency of The Case-Crossover Design

The case-crossover design has been used by many researchers to study the transient effect of an exposure on the risk of a rare outcome. In a case-crossover design, only cases are sampled and each case will act as his/her own control. The time of failure acts as the case and non failure times act as the controls. Case-crossover designs have frequently been used to study the effect of environmental exposures on rare diseases or mortality. Time trends and seasonal confounding may be present in environmental studies and thus need to be controlled for by the sampling design. Several sampling methods are available for this purpose. In time-stratified sampling, disjoint strata of equal size are formed and the control times within the case stratum are used for comparison. The random semi-symmetric sampling design randomly selects a control time for comparison from two possible control times. The fixed semi-symmetric sampling design is a modified version of the random semi-symmetric sampling design that removes the random selection. Simulations show that the fixed semi-symmetric sampling design improves the variance of the random semi-symmetric sampling estimator by at least 35% for the exposures we studied. We derive expressions for the asymptotic variance of risk estimators for these designs, and show, that while the designs are not theoretically equivalent, in many realistic situations, the random semi-symmetric sampling design has similar efficiency to a time-stratified sampling design of size two and the fixed semi-symmetric sampling design has similar efficiency to a time-stratified sampling design of size three.     

相关性分析中Copula函数的选择

Copula函数在金融分析和风险管理中有广泛的应用,利用Copula函数可以构建组合风险资产的联合收益分布和资产之间的相关性.在构建Copula模型时,一个关键的问题就是如何选择最佳的Copula来拟合实际的金融数据.文章分析了Copula函数选择困难的原因,指出了现有的似然准则选择方法的不足,提出了基于参数Bootstrap技术的对数似然准则检验方法,考虑了更大范围的Copula函数族群,利用模拟实验检验了该方法的选择能力,模拟结果表明对于没有尾部相关性的Copula函数和具有较小的尾部相关性的Copula函数可以较好地进行区分,而且也能区分大部分的具有较大尾部相关系数的Copula函数.同现有的只能区分常见的几类Copula的似然准则选择方法相比,文章提出的方法可以在更大范围内识别不同的Copula函数.     

The Demand for Lotto: The Role of Conscious Selection

This article presents estimates of the elasticity of demand for lottery tickets using time series data in which there is variation in the expected value of a lottery ticket induced by rollovers. An important feature of our data is that there are far more rollovers than expected given the lottery design. We find strong evidence that individuals do not choose their lottery numbers uniformly from a uniform distribution—that is, conscious selection. We use our estimates to derive the inverse supply function for the industry, and this enables us to identify the demand elasticity. We find the price elasticity to be close to unity, which implies that the operator is revenue maximizing—which is the regulator's objective.