Quantifying factors giving rise to temporal variation in forest fires is important for advancing scientific understanding and improving fire prevention. We demonstrate that eighty percent of the large year-to-year variation in forest area burned in California can be accounted for by variation in...

The asymptotic distribution of the linear instrumental variables (IV) estimator with empirically selected ridge regression penalty is characterized. The regularization tuning parameter is selected by splitting the observed data into training and test samples and becomes an estimated parameter...

Many urban school districts in the United States and OECD countries confront the necessity of closing schools due to declining enrollments. To address this important policy question, we formulate a sequential game where a superintendent is tasked with closing down a certain percentage of student...