PRIOR ELICITATION IN MULTIPLE CHANGE‐POINT MODELS*

This article discusses Bayesian inference in change‐point models. The main existing approaches treat all change‐points equally, a priori, using either a Uniform prior or an informative hierarchical prior. Both approaches assume a known number of change‐points. Some undesirable properties of these approaches are discussed. We develop a new Uniform prior that allows some of the change‐points to occur out of sample. This prior has desirable properties, can be interpreted as “noninformative,” and treats the number of change‐points as unknown. Artificial and real data exercises show how these different priors can have a substantial impact on estimation and prediction.     

Following the story: narrative mapping as a mobile method for tracking and interrogating spatial narratives

Museums and heritage tourism sites are highly curated places of memory work whose function is the assembling and ordering of space and narrative to contour visitors’ experiences of the past. Variations in such experiences within and between sites, however, necessitates a method that: (1) captures how guides, visitors, and exhibits interact within spaces when representing and performing history and (2) allows researchers to document those variations. We developed narrative mapping, a mobile and geographically sensitive form of participant observation, to enable museum scholars and professionals to systematically capture, visualize, and interpret tendencies and variations in the content, affective qualities, and spatial arrangements of museum narratives over multiple sites and across multiple tours at the same site. Two antebellum plantation museum case studies, Laura Plantation in Louisiana and Virginia’s Berkeley Plantation, demonstrate the method’s utility in documenting how stories are spatially configured and materially enlivened in order to analyze the ways enslaved persons are placed within these narratives.     

Twenty years of minority PhDs in accounting: Signs of success and segregation

This study examines the minority status of the 3213 individuals who have earned U.S. accounting PhDs in the last 20 years and considers the relative progress along the academic pipeline of minority graduates. Overall, this study indicates that minority accounting PhD graduates are making greater progress along the academic pipeline than that indicated in many other disciplines. However, the study finds that while accounting doctoral graduation rates of minorities are increasing they have not reached parity with population rates or academia in general. While the overall cohort of minority graduates appear, on average, to have patterns of employment and promotion similar to the non-minority graduates, recent minority PhD graduates are attending significantly lower ranked schools than either earlier minority graduates or their more recent non-minority peers and are gaining employment in lower ranked institutions than their non-minority peers. The findings suggest that while there are signs of success in minority progress, there are also signs of segregation.     

Analytic radicalism

Brennan and Hamlin provide a normative justification for dispositional conservatism based on the concave value functions which give rise to quasi-risk aversion. This note modifies this argument for “analytic conservatism” by allowing jurisdictional exit in response to institutional decline. By providing a welfare floor which limits the cost of failure, exit reverses the normative implications of Brennan and Hamlin’s argument, making risk-neutral agents quasi-risk seeking and justifying a radical disposition to reform under some circumstances.     

Modelling Impacts of Wildlife Tourism on Animal Communities: A Case Study from Royal Chitwan National Park,Nepal

This paper describes the development of a generic model which allows for the analysis of wildlife-tourism interaction impacts in the natural environment. The development of a computer system to facilitate the collection of data and the use of this model is described, using data collected on large mammals in Royal Chitwan National Park, Nepal. The computer system stores parameters describing wildlife tours and animal characteristics for an area and plots regions of disturbance and non-disturbance for the animal in that area. Predictions can then be made regarding the potential impacts of tourism on the animal species for the area. Applications for this model and computer system include the management of high tourism areas at sustainable levels so that tourist enjoyment is maintained and animal disturbance is minimised.     

Converting Clinical Literature to an Insured Population: A Comparison of Models Using Nhanes

Abstract

The use of clinical literature to set risk classification standards for life insurance underwriting stems from the need to set the most accurate standards using the best available information. A necessary hurdle in this process is converting any excess mortality observed in a clinical study to the appropriate rating for use in underwriting. A widely accepted model in the insurance industry, the Excess Death Rate model, treats the excess as additive to the conditional probability of death for an insurance company’s unimpaired class.

In this paper we test the validity of that model versus other common predictive models of excess mortality in an insured population. Applying these models to National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) data, we derive estimates for excess mortality from three commonly seen underwriting impairments in what could be considered a clinical population. These estimates are added to an estimate of an insurance company’s unimpaired mortality class and then used to predict deaths in an “insurable” subset of that clinical population.

The Excess Death Rate model performed the best of all models, having the smallest cumulative difference of actual to predicted deaths. The use of publicly available data, such as that in NHANES, could help bridge the gap between clinical literature and its application in insurance underwriting if insurable cohorts can be reliably identified from these generally healthy, ambulatory groups.     

The relationship between factor shares and economic development

The stability of factor shares has long been considered one of the “stylized facts” of macroeconomics. Most factor share studies, however, acknowledge only two factors of production (total capital and total labor), which yields misleading results. I distinguish between reproducible and non-reproducible factors of production. I disentangle physical capital’s share from natural capital’s share and human capital’s share from unskilled labor’s share. Results reveal that non-reproducible factor shares decrease with the stage of economic development, and reproducible factor shares increase with the stage of economic development. This evidence suggests that studies relying on the macroeconomic paradigm of constant factor shares should be revisited. The evidence also supports endogenous growth models that allow technical progress to manifest itself via changes in factor shares.