Analyzing non-stationarity in cement stone pit by median polish interpolation: a case study

The raw materials utilized in the manufacture of cement comprise mainly of lime, silica, alumina and iron oxide. Spatial evaluation of these main chemical constituents of cement has crucial importance for providing effective production. Because these components are composed of some raw materials such as limestone and marl, the spatial relationships in a calcareous marl stone pit was taken into consideration. In practice, spatial field data taken from a cement quarry may include some variations and trends. For modeling and removing spatial trend in a cement raw material quarry as well as providing unbiased estimates, median polish kriging was used. By using the variation of the data itself, some approximations and interpolations were carried out. It was recorded that the method obtained outlier-resistant estimation of spatial trend without needing an external exploratory variable. In addition, it provided very effective estimations and additional information for analyzing spatial non-stationary data.     

Characterization of self-selective social choice functions on the tops-only domain

Self-selectivity is a new kind of consistency pertaining to social choice rules. It deals with the problem of whether a social choice rule selects itself from among other rival such rules when a society is also to choose the choice rule that it will employ in making its choice from a given set of alternatives. Koray [3] shows that a neutral and unanimous social choice function is universally self-selective if and only if it is dictatorial. In this paper, we confine the available social choice functions to the tops-only domain and examine whether such restriction allow us to escape the dictatoriality result. A neutral, unanimous, and tops-only social choice function, however, turns out to be self-selective relative to the tops-only domain if and only if it is top-monotonic, and thus again dictatorial. Received: 8 October 2001/Accepted: 4 June 2002     

The impact of party affiliation of US governors on immigrants’ labor market outcomes

Do immigrants have better labor market outcomes under Democratic governors? By exploiting variations associated with close elections in a regression discontinuity (RD) design applied on gubernatorial elections in 50 states over the last two decades, we find that immigrants are more likely to be employed, work longer hours and more weeks, and have higher earnings under Democratic governors. Results are robust to a number of different specifications, controls, and samples.     

Bootstrap confidence intervals for the coefficient of quartile variation

ABSTRACT

In non-normal populations, it is more convenient to use the coefficient of quartile variation rather than the coefficient of variation. This study compares the percentile and t-bootstrap confidence intervals with Bonett's confidence interval for the quartile variation. We show that empirical coverage of the bootstrap confidence intervals is closer to the nominal coverage (0.95) for small sample sizes (n = 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 15) for most distributions studied. Bootstrap confidence intervals also have smaller average width. Thus, we propose using bootstrap confidence intervals for the coefficient of quartile variation when the sample size is small.