Bootstrapping Student Understanding of What is Going on in Econometrics

Econometrics is an intellectual game played by rules based on the sampling distribution concept. Most students in econometrics classes are uncomfortable because they do not know these rules and so do not understand what is going on in econometrics. This article contains some explanations for this phenomenon and suggestions for how this problem can be addressed. Instructors are encouraged to use explain-how-to-bootstrap exercises to promote student understanding of the rules of the game.     

大学生高频率转发微博的行为分析与思考

近年来,随着中国互联网的高速发展和手机、电脑等通讯设备在大学生中的普及,越来越多的大学生开始使用微博与外界进行沟通。通过对以往文献的查阅我们发现,大学生在使用微博的过程中存在着一定的行为特征和差异性。通过问卷调查的方式对大学生转发微博的行为进行了分析,结论证明了大学生在转发微博的过程中存在着性别差异性,而且大学生对于所转发微博的合法性问题普遍缺乏关注,网络法制观念有待提高,应加强对大学生的网络法律意识的培养。     

A Goldsmith Exercise for Learning Money Creation

In this article, the authors outline a classroom exercise involving goldsmiths designed to improve undergraduate students’ understanding of how banks create money. This concept is important to macroeconomics and money and banking courses, yet students frequently struggle with it, largely due to the nonphysical nature of deposits and reserves. In contrast, gold-based banking systems tend to be more intuitive because of the physical nature of gold. By simulating interactions among a goldsmith, a depositor, a merchant, and a borrower in a gold-based system, students gain a deeper understanding of reserves and money creation. In particular, the exercise illuminates the intricate link between lending and the creation of new money, and highlights the importance of fractional reserve banking and reserve deposits.     

Do Morning Classes Improve Student Learning of Microeconomics Principles?

This article analyzes the impact of class time on students’ grades by using data from Middle Tennessee State University. The data cover a period of six years and are based on a sample of 5803 individuals who enrolled in 133 sections of principles of microeconomics. To identify the causal impact of class time on students’ grades, I used a bootstrapping method which allowed assigning measures of accuracy to sample estimates. For males, the estimated coefficients were negative and statistically significant at the 10% level, and the coefficients suggested that a male student in an afternoon class could expect to earn a letter grade that is 0.029 points lower than he would have earned by taking the class in the morning. For females, the estimated coefficients were not statistically significant.     

Comparing structural efficiency of unbalanced subsamples: A resampling adaptation of data envelopment analysis

This paper investigates the performance of a bootstrapping enhanced DEA to measure the relative structural efficiency of unbalanced subsamples. Although this issue plays an important role in applied DEA, it is often ignored, resulting in misleading conclusions concerning relative efficiency. It is shown, that a reasampling approach to DEA can cope with this problem and also allows the use of pooled samples. The distribution of a statistic to test the hypotheses of equal structural efficiency is derived from Monte Carlo simulations and compared with the corresponding statistic calculated from standard DEA results. While the resampling variant of DEA justifies the use of the normal approximation, this is not the case for standard DEA.     

On the economics of trials: adversarial process, evidence, and equilibrium bias

The adversarial provision of evidence is modeled as a game inwhich two parties engage in strategic sequential search. Anaxiomatic approach is used to characterize a court's decisionbased on the evidence provided. Although this process treatsthe evidence submissions in an unbiased way, the equilibriumoutcome may still exhibit bias. Bias arises from differencesin the cost of sampling or asymmetry in the sampling distribution.In a multistage model, a prodefendant bias arises in the firststage from a divergence between the parties' stakes. Finally,the adversarial process generates additional costs that screenout some otherwise meritorious cases.     

Imperfect recognizability and coexistence of money and higher-return assets

Existing solutions to the problem of coexistence of money and higher-return substitutes that rely on imperfect recognizability of the substitutes adopt extreme assumptions: they either have a zero cost of counterfeiting the substitutes or omit plausible refinements that would rule out pooling equilibria. Here coexistence is obtained with a general distribution of positive counterfeiting costs within a signaling-game framework in which the intuitive criterion is invoked. Moreover, if the cost of counterfeiting is small, then any monetary equilibrium that satisfies the intuitive criterion necessarily exhibits coexistence. A continuity assumption on off-equilibrium beliefs is also considered. It is satisfied by equilibria with small use of substitutes, but not by cash-in-advance equilibria.     

STUDENT OUTCOMES AT UNIVERSITY IN AUSTRALIA: A QUANTILE REGRESSION APPROACH*

Students’ success during their first year at university is largely influenced by their university entrance score. Personal characteristics and secondary school characteristics also impact on success. This paper uses quantile regression to investigate how the effects of these factors vary along the grade distribution. It finds that the factors which influence grades have a more pronounced impact on the success of low‐achieving students than on that of high‐achieving students. These results have implications for student selection and also for the way scholarships may be used to attract talented high school students.     

Bootstrapping the autoregressive structure of cross-country demand systems

A simulation based on Efron's (1979) bootstrapping technique suggests that the asymptotic chi-square distribution provides adequate confidence intervals for the autoregressive parameter in cross-country demand systems.     

知识管理在直觉决策中的作用

在管理领域,直觉相对于逻辑思维所具有的系统整体性、创造性和快速简捷性等若干特质,使得它的作用不可忽视,甚至成为决定性因素.从知识角度看来,直觉决策是一个知识获取、运用和创新的过程.知识管理作为一种创新管理模式,是解决决策与知识匹配的有力工具.文章在分析了知识管理与直觉决策内在统一性的基础上,从修正直觉决策偏差、弥补知识缺口和提高决策效率三个方面研究了知识管理在直觉决策中的作用.决策主体在了解直觉并拥有正确的直觉观后,就应顺应知识管理的核心要求,充分利用直觉决策.本文研究的目的在于从知识管理视角因势利导直觉决策过程中的倾向与特征,为直觉决策从无意识的习惯转变为有意识的行动,提供理论与实践依据.     

Measuring systemic risk using vine-copula

We present an intuitive model of systemic risk to analyse the complex interdependencies between different borrowers. We characterise systemic risk by the way that financial institutions are interconnected. Using their probability of default, we classify different international financial institutions into five rating groups. Then we use the state-of-the-art canonical (C-) and D-vine copulae to investigate the partial correlation structure between the rating groups. Amongst many interesting findings, we discover that the second tier financial institutions pay a larger contribution to the systemic risk than the top tier borrowers. Further, we discuss an application of our methodology for pricing credit derivative swaps.     

The use of bootstrapped Malmquist indices to reassess productivity change findings: an application to a sample of Polish farms

This article assesses the extent to which sampling variation affects findings about Malmquist productivity change derived using data envelopment analysis (DEA), in the first stage by calculating productivity indices and in the second stage by investigating the farm-specific change in productivity. Confidence intervals for Malmquist indices are constructed using Simar and Wilson's (1999) bootstrapping procedure. The main contribution of this article is to account in the second stage for the information in the second stage provided by the first-stage bootstrap. The DEA SEs of the Malmquist indices given by bootstrapping are employed in an innovative heteroscedastic panel regression, using a maximum likelihood procedure. The application is to a sample of 250 Polish farms over the period 1996 to 2000. The confidence intervals’ results suggest that the second half of 1990s for Polish farms was characterized not so much by productivity regress but rather by stagnation. As for the determinants of farm productivity change, we find that the integration of the DEA SEs in the second-stage regression is significant in explaining a proportion of the variance in the error term. Although our heteroscedastic regression results differ with those from the standard OLS, in terms of significance and sign, they are consistent with theory and previous research.     

ENVY, INSTITUTIONS AND GROWTH

The use of interdependent preferences provides an intuitive link between institutions and growth. Envious agents that care about relative wealth choose to use an available destruction technology to inflict harm on the wealth of other agents when institutions fail to make property rights secure, while they use a production technology to increase their wealth when institutions make it easy and hassle-free to engage in production. The use of interdependent preferences is justified by an extensive literature and can provide a motive for agents to take actions that block growth in the absence of theft or other concrete gains.     

The unequal distribution of economic education: A report on the race,ethnicity, and gender of economics majors at U.S. colleges and universities

Economic education is distributed unequally. Among U.S. undergraduates, women and underrepresented minority students collectively major in economics at 0.36 the rate that white, non-Hispanic men do. The authors establish a definition of full inclusion in economic education and use that definition to evaluate the status quo and to compare institutions. A companion resource, hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, provides interactive access to the data to attract and inform the attention of economists, university administrators, and others. The authors explain why the need to improve the distribution of economic education is urgent, including the imperative to support economic policymaking. Lastly, they point the way forward, identifying currently available resources and reasonable next steps for all involved parties to take.     

论按生产要素分配的依据

确立按生产要素分配的依据 ,首先要分清两个问题 :一是不能将价值创造和价值分配相混淆 ;二是按生产要素分配的依据不是要素价值论。按生产要素分配在马克思的劳动价值论中找不到依据 ,似乎在西方经济学的“三位一体公式”中可以找到依据。但按生产要素的贡献大小来决定分配 ,其中生产要素贡献大小的量无法确定。克拉克依据生产率递减规律 ,用边际产品收益来测算生产要素的报酬 ,存在着一系列无法解决的难题 ,因而是不科学的。按生产要素分配的依据只能是生产要素所有者的所有权在经济上的实现形式。     

A Bayesian approach to model changes in volatility in the Mexican stock exchange index

We model the changes in volatility in the Mexican Stock Exchange Index using a Bayesian approach. We study the time series with a wide set of models characterized by a Markov switching heterogeneity. The advantage of this approach is that it allows for a broader spectrum of possible models since the estimation of the moments of the parameters is done using the finite mixture distribution MCMC method, without relying on assumptions about large sampling and mathematical optimization. This is particularly relevant for emerging markets’ financial data because of its special characteristics, like being more susceptible to jumps and changes in volatility caused by exchange rate swings, financial crises and oil and commodity prices. For model comparison, we use the marginal likelihood approach and the bridge sampling technique. The best representation of the data is given by a switching model with three states rather than any other autoregressive linear or non-linear model. The periods of volatility found by the model coincide with different financial crisis. Whereas other studies of volatility for the same market impose the Markovian model that captures changes in volatility, we let our model to be defined in an endogenous way.     

Product liability and the virtues of asymmetric information

This paper analyzes a two-period setup in which firms differ with respect to costs of care and may use care-taking to signal type to consumers, who are able to observe precaution taken only ex post. Applying the refinement of the intuitive criterion to the concept of the perfect Bayesian equilibrium, we establish a unique separating equilibrium for every share of harm borne by firms. For low levels of victim compensation, we show that (i) firms choose weakly higher care in a setting in which customers do not know the firms’ type than in a setting in which they do, and (ii) the deviation in precaution taken due to asymmetric information on firm type is welfare-improving.     

何以激发越轨创新——双元领导与责任知觉的作用

在开放式创新背景下,越轨创新逐渐成为突破创新瓶颈、摆脱创新困境的重要途径。对研发部门421位员工进行两时点问卷调研,并运用层次回归、Bootstrapping法构建双元领导影响越轨创新的中介―调节模型。结果表明,双元领导和责任知觉对越轨创新具有显著正向预测作用;责任知觉在双元领导与越轨创新间起部分中介作用;游戏动态性在责任知觉与越轨创新间起正向调节作用。研究结论从领导行为和员工责任感知视角揭示了越轨创新发生的路径及边界条件,为开放式创新下的个体自主创新管理提供了重要借鉴。     

A classroom game on a negative externality correcting tax: Revenue return,regressivity, and the double dividend

The concept of negative externality is central to the teaching of environmental economics, but corrective taxes are almost always regressive. How exactly might governments return externality-correcting tax revenue to overcome regressivity and not alter marginal incentives? In addition, there is a desire to achieve a double dividend in the use of externality-correcting taxes, that is, to use the revenue to offset existing distortionary taxes, such as those on labor that produce a dead weight loss. In this article, the authors explain a classroom game that was developed for students to understand the theory of externalities, taxation dead weight loss, and regressivity. Then, the problem helps students explore the actual design of a policy that satisfies the double dividend hypothesis and corrects for regressivity.