Using a Laplace approximation to estimate the random coefficients logit model by non-linear least squares

Current methods of estimating the random coefficients logit model employ simulations of the distribution of the taste parameters through pseudo-random sequences. These methods suffer from difficulties in estimating correlations between parameters and computational limitations such as the curse of dimensionality. This paper provides a solution to these problems by approximating the integral expression of the expected choice probability using a multivariate extension of the Laplace approximation. Simulation results reveal that our method performs very well, both in terms of accuracy and computational time.

“The sword has not yet fallen”: Is Administrative Guidance Jeopardizing Constitutional Rights?

The Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity (“FHEO”) has a duty to investigate sex-based discrimination in housing. In accordance with recent Supreme Court precedent—which held that Title VII’s prohibition on “sex” discrimination necessarily includes discrimination on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation—FHEO broadened its definition of sex-based discrimination in an internal memorandum published February 11, 2021. This memorandum directed officers to investigate discrimination in housing based on gender identity and sexual orientation. The change unnerved a private Christian college, College of the Ozarks, located in Missouri. Fearing that this internal memorandum threatened its ability to place students in dorms based on their biological sex, the school sued the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (“HUD”) and the Biden administration, claiming its constitutional rights were abridged. The district court found, and the Eighth Circuit affirmed, that College of the Ozarks lacked standing to bring the suit against the defendants

Active flutter control for flexible vehicles, volume 1

An active flutter control methodology based on linear quadratic gaussian theory and its application to the control of a super critical wing is presented. Results of control surface and sensor position optimization are discussed. Both frequency response matching and residualization used to obtain practical flutter controllers are examined. The development of algorithms and computer programs for flutter modeling and active control design procedures is reported

Social Media And Networking Technologies: An Analysis Of Collaborative Work And Team Communication

Digital communication increases students’ learning outcomes in higher education. Web 2.0 technologies encourages students’ active engagement, collaboration, and participation in class activities, facilitates group work, and encourages information sharing among students. Familiarity with organizational use and sharing in social networks aids students who are expected to be facile in these technologies upon graduation (Benson, Filippaios, and Morgan, 2010). Faculty members become coaches, monitoring and providing feedback to students rather than directing activities. While Web 2.0 technologies, including social networks, may act as a distraction in a teaching environment, our findings suggest that effective social networking in learning environments sustain quality instruction and skills-development in business education

Preference purification and the inner rational agent:A critique of the conventional wisdom of behavioural welfare economics

Neoclassical economics assumes that individuals have stable and context-independent preferences, and uses preference-satisfaction as a normative criterion. By calling this assumption into question, behavioural findings cause fundamental problems for normative economics. A common response to these problems is to treat deviations from conventional rational-choice theory as mistakes, and to try to reconstruct the preferences that individuals would have acted on, had they reasoned correctly. We argue that this preference purification approach implicitly uses a dualistic model of the human being, in which an inner rational agent is trapped in an outer psychological shell. This model is psychologically and philosophically problematic

Visualising Silicon in Plants: Histochemistry, Silica Sculptures and Elemental Imaging.

Silicon is a non-essential element for plants and is available in biota as silicic acid. Its presence has been associated with a general improvement of plant vigour and response to exogenous stresses. Plants accumulate silicon in their tissues as amorphous silica and cell walls are preferential sites. While several papers have been published on the mitigatory effects that silicon has on plants under stress, there has been less research on imaging silicon in plant tissues. Imaging offers important complementary results to molecular data, since it provides spatial information. Herein, the focus is on histochemistry coupled to optical microscopy, fluorescence and scanning electron microscopy of microwave acid extracted plant silica, techniques based on particle-induced X-ray emission, X-ray fluorescence spectrometry and mass spectrometry imaging (NanoSIMS). Sample preparation procedures will not be discussed in detail, as several reviews have already treated this subject extensively. We focus instead on the information that each technique provides by offering, for each imaging approach, examples from both silicifiers (giant horsetail and rice) and non-accumulators (Cannabis sativa L.)

License prices for financially constrained firms

It is often alleged that high auction prices inhibit service deployment. We investigate this claim under the extreme case of financially constrained bidders. If demand is just slightly elastic, auctions maximize consumer surplus if consumer surplus is a convex function of quantity (a common assumption), or if consumer surplus is concave and the proportion of expenditure spent on deployment is greater than one over the elasticity of demand. The latter condition appears to be true for most of the large telecom auctions in the US and Europe. Thus, even if high auction prices inhibit service deployment, auctions appear to be optimal from the consumers’ point of view

Combining Two Consistent Estimators

This chapter shows how a weighted average of a forward and reverse Jackknife IV estimator (JIVE) yields estimators that are robust against heteroscedasticity and many instruments. These estimators, called HFUL (Heteroscedasticity robust Fuller) and HLIM (Heteroskedasticity robust limited information maximum likelihood (LIML)) were introduced by Hausman, Newey, Woutersen, Chao, and Swanson (2012), but without derivation. Combining consistent estimators is a theme that is associated with Jerry Hausman and, therefore, we present this derivation in this volume. Additionally, and in order to further understand and interpret HFUL and HLIM in the context of jackknife type variance ratio estimators, we show that a new variant of HLIM, under specific grouped data settings with dummy instruments, simplifies to the Bekker and van der Ploeg (2005) MM (method of moments) estimator