American Attitudes toward Guest Worker Policies

In this study we use data from a 2004 New York Times/CBS News national survey to analyze public opinion toward a guest worker program and to compare predictors of support for guest worker and general immigration policies. In general, Americans tend to be divided in their attitudes toward a guest worker program, although support for temporary worker policies is stronger when legalization for unauthorized immigrants is conditioned on certain requirements, and when the program is coupled with enhanced border security. The results of the bivariate probit analysis indicate that individuals who favor reducing the immigration level also tend to oppose instituting a guest worker program. Perceptions of the “costs” of immigration emerged as the most important determinant of individuals’ attitudes toward immigration policies; such beliefs contributed to opposition to a guest worker policy and support for reducing the immigration level. We also found that residents of high‐immigration states and Latinos were more likely to support a temporary worker program. However, these characteristics do not appear to influence individuals’ judgments about the number of immigrants who should be admitted to the United States. Findings regarding the impact of political partisanship and ideology on attitudes toward the two policies were more ambiguous.     

Using High-Frequency Data in Dynamic Portfolio Choice

This article evaluates the economic benefit of methods that have been suggested to optimally sample (in an MSE sense) high-frequency return data for the purpose of realized variance/covariance estimation in the presence of market microstructure noise (Bandi and Russell, 2005a, 2008). We compare certainty equivalents derived from volatility-timing trading strategies relying on optimally-sampled realized variances and covariances, on realized variances and covariances obtained by sampling every 5 minutes, and on realized variances and covariances obtained by sampling every 15 minutes. In our sample, we show that a risk-averse investor who is given the option of choosing variance/covariance forecasts derived from MSE-based optimal sampling methods versus forecasts obtained from 5- and 15-minute intervals (as generally proposed in the literature) would be willing to pay up to about 80 basis points per year to achieve the level of utility that is guaranteed by optimal sampling. We find that the gains yielded by optimal sampling are economically large, statistically significant, and robust to realistic transaction costs.     

The role of need for contraception in the evaluation of interventions to improve access to family-planning methods

A nonrandomized experiment carried out in Jharkhand, India, shows how the effects of interventions designed to improve access to family-planning methods can be erroneously regarded as trivial when contraceptive use is utilized as dependent variable, ignoring women's need for contraception. Significant effects of the intervention were observed on met need (i.e., contraceptive use by women who need contraception) but not on contraceptive use (i.e., contraceptive use by women who may or may not need contraception). Met need captures the woman's success in overcoming barriers to access to family planning, whereas contraceptive use confounds this construct with risk of pregnancy and fertility desires. Exceptions to this rule are identified.     

The Revealed Preference Theory of Stable and Extremal Stable Matchings

We investigate the testable implications of the theory of stable matchings. We provide a characterization of the matchings that are rationalizable as stable matchings when agents' preferences are unobserved. The characterization is a simple nonparametric test for stability, in the tradition of revealed preference tests. We also characterize the observed stable matchings when monetary transfers are allowed and the stable matchings that are best for one side of the market: extremal stable matchings. We find that the theory of extremal stable matchings is observationally equivalent to requiring that there be a unique stable matching or that the matching be consistent with unrestricted monetary transfers.     

An information theoretic approach to post randomization methods under differential privacy

Statistics and Computing - Post randomization methods are among the most popular disclosure limitation techniques for both categorical and continuous data. In the categorical case, given a...     

Fiducial Inferences for the Truncated Exponential Distribution

Lindqvist and Taraldsen (2005 Lindqvist , B. H. , Taraldsen , G. ( 2005 ). Monte Carlo conditioning on a sufficient statistic . Biometrika 92 : 451 – 464 .[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) introduced an interesting parametric family of distributions in the unit interval. In this note, inference procedures are given, both from the classical and the Bayesian view point. It is shown numerically through various examples that the posterior distribution for the parameter and the induced fiducial distribution are almost equivalent. The parametric family under study is a regular member of the Natural Exponential Family and so use of this fact permits induction of a unique fiducial in terms of the minimal sufficient statistic.     

Testing Models With Multiple Equilibria by Quantile Methods

This paper proposes a method for testing complementarities between explanatory and dependent variables in a large class of economic models. The proposed test is based on the monotone comparative statics (MCS) property of equilibria. Our main result is that MCS produces testable implications on the (small and large) quantiles of the dependent variable, despite the presence of multiple equilibria. The key features of our approach are that (i) we work with a nonparametric structural model of a continuous dependent variable in which the unobservable is allowed to be correlated with the explanatory variable in a reasonably general way; (ii) we do not require the structural function to be known or estimable; (iii) we remain fairly agnostic on how an equilibrium is selected. We illustrate the usefulness of our result for policy evaluation within Berry, Levinsohn, and Pakes's (1999) model.     

Market Structure and Multiple Equilibria in Airline Markets

We provide a practical method to estimate the payoff functions of players in complete information, static, discrete games. With respect to the empirical literature on entry games originated by Bresnahan and Reiss (1990) and Berry (1992), the main novelty of our framework is to allow for general forms of heterogeneity across players without making equilibrium selection assumptions. We allow the effects that the entry of each individual airline has on the profits of its competitors, its “competitive effects,” to differ across airlines. The identified features of the model are sets of parameters (partial identification) such that the choice probabilities predicted by the econometric model are consistent with the empirical choice probabilities estimated from the data. We apply this methodology to investigate the empirical importance of firm heterogeneity as a determinant of market structure in the U.S. airline industry. We find evidence of heterogeneity across airlines in their profit functions. The competitive effects of large airlines (American, Delta, United) are different from those of low cost carriers and Southwest. Also, the competitive effect of an airline is increasing in its airport presence, which is an important measure of observable heterogeneity in the airline industry. Then we develop a policy experiment to estimate the effect of repealing the Wright Amendment on competition in markets out of the Dallas airports. We find that repealing the Wright Amendment would increase the number of markets served out of Dallas Love.     

Ideology and the Affective Structure of Whites' Racial Perceptions

The present study tests the hypothesis that deviations from"affective bipolarity" in the relationship between the positiveand negative dimensions of whites’ stereotypes of blacks—suchas racial ambivalence—should be stronger among conservatives.Across two different data sets (the 2000 National Election Studyand the 1991 National Race and Politics Study) and three differentmethodologies (heteroskedastic regression, confirmatory factoranalysis, and a regression analysis of attitude-ambivalencescores), this hypothesis was supported. Further analyses indicatedthat the relationship between conservatism and ambivalent perceptionsof blacks was mediated by conflict between humanitarian andindividualistic concerns in the racial context, but not in theabstract.