PARENTAL CHOICE OF SCHOOL CHARACTERISTICS: ESTIMATION USING STATE-WIDE DATA

This article attempts to proxy parental alienation from public schools across states in order to obtain measures of quality dispersion and of the educational characteristics to which families are most sensitive. The indicator of alienation is the choice of private schooling. Since the likelihood of such choice is known from published enrollment ratios, the task is to explain why they vary so widely across states. Of the newer hypotheses tested, that of teacher strike records is strongly significant and in the expected direction. Other novel findings concern the share of administration, teacher memberships of the National Education Association and the proportion of whites to nonwhites in the population.     

Estimation of the Length Distribution of Marine Populations in the Gaussian-multinomial Setting using the Method of Moments

In this paper, the problem of estimation of the length distribution of marine populations in the Gaussian-multinomial model is considered. For the purpose of the mean and covariance parameter estimation, the method of moments estimators are developed. That is, minimum variance linear unbiased estimator for the mean frequency vector is derived and a consistent estimator for the covariance matrix of the length observations is presented. The usefulness of the proposed estimators is illustrated with an analysis of real cod length measurement data.