Empirical studies have found that cannabis commonly precedes consumption of drugs like amphetamine, ecstasy, cocaine and heroin. As a result a causal linkage between cannabis and subsequent hard drug use has been hypothesized. Despite mixed empirical evidence and a limited understanding of...

Smallholder farmers’ preferences for participation in contract farming may take the form of proportional data-whereby farmers only sell some proportions or fractions of their output to contractors. We analyze determinants for preferences for zero (potential corner solution) and proportional...

Hidden Markov models (HMMs) are used to study language, sleep, and other processes that reflect probabilistic transitions between states that cannot be observed directly. We apply HMMs to data from experiments on visual location games. In these games, people choose a pixel from an image. They...

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...