In Thornburg v. Gingles, the Supreme Court provided the elemental test for vote dilution claims under § 2 of the Voting Rights Act. In part, § 2 requires Plaintiffs to prove that voting patterns within the challenged jurisdiction are polarized by race. Because most states do not track the race...

This paper studies how to combine real-time forecasts from a broad range of Bayesian vector autoregression (BVAR) specifications and survey forecasts by optimally exploiting their properties. To do that, it compares the forecasting performance of optimal pooling and tilting techniques, including...

This paper presents a multilevel model that examines the determinants of individual differences in ethical attitudes (as indicated in opinions of bribery) which underpin tax compliance (Alm & Torgler, 2011). The drivers of individual ethical attitudes are fundamental when examining individual...

Estimating demand for wide assortments of differentiated goods requires the specification of a demand system that is sufficiently flexible. However, flexible models are highly parameterized so estimation requires appropriate forms of regularization to avoid overfitting. In this paper, we study...

Understanding individual customers’ sensitivities to prices, promotions, brand, and other aspects of the marketing mix is fundamental to a wide swath of marketing problems, including targeting and pricing. Companies that operate across many product categories have a unique opportunity, insofar...

We investigate empirically the existence of a heterogeneous relation between foreign direct investment (FDI) and economic growth across developing countries. We argue that, across countries, differences in institutional quality are correlated with heterogeneous absorptive capacities and hence a...

When individuals in a social network learn about an unknown state from private signals and neighbors’ actions, the network structure often causes information loss. We consider rational agents and Gaussian signals in the canonical sequential social-learning problem and ask how the network...

We survey Bayesian methods for estimating dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models in this article. We focus on New Keynesian (NK)DSGE models because of the interest shown in this class of models by economists in academic and policy-making institutions. This interest stems from the...

The authors show that in weakly identified models (1) the posterior mode will not be a consistent estimator of the true parameter vector, (2) the posterior distribution will not be Gaussian even asymptotically, and (3) Bayesian credible sets and frequentist confidence sets will not coincide...

We model the United States macroeconomic and financial sectors using a formal and unified econometric model. Through shrinkage, our Bayesian VAR provides a flexible framework for modeling the dynamics of thirty-one variables, many of which are tracked by the Federal Reserve. We show how the...