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The author draws on examples from a range of disciplines to provide social and behavioural scientists with a toolkit for finding bounds when predicting behaviours based upon nonexperimental and experimental data.
This book is a full-scale exposition of Charles Manski's new methodology for analyzing empirical questions in the social sciences. He recommends that researchers first ask what can be learned from data alone, and then ask what can be learned when data are combined with credible weak assumptions. Inferences predicated on weak assumptions, he argues, can achieve wide consensus, while ones that require strong assumptions almost inevitably are subject to sharp disagreements. Building on the foundation laid in the author's Identification Problems in the Social Sciences (Harvard, 1995), the book's fifteen chapters are organized in three parts. Part I studies prediction with missing or otherwise incomplete data. Part II concerns the analysis of treatment response, which aims to predict outcomes when alternative treatment rules are applied to a population. Part III studies prediction of choice behavior. Each chapter juxtaposes developments of methodology with empirical or numerical illustrations. The book employs a simple notation and mathematical apparatus, using only basic elements of probability theory.
For the past few years, the author, a renowned economist, has been applying the statistical tools of economics to decision making under uncertainty in the context of patient health status and response to treatment. He shows how statistical imprecision and identification problems affect empirical research in the patient-care sphere.
The book presents in a rigorous and thorough manner the main elements of Charles Manski's research on partial identification of probability distributions. The approach to inference that runs throughout the book is deliberately conservative and thoroughly nonparametric. There is an enormous scope for fruitful inference using data and assumptions that partially identify population parameters.
"This book addresses key aspects of this broad question, exploring and partially resolving pervasive problems of identification and statistical inference that arise when studying treatment response and making treatment choices. Charles Manski addresses the treatment-choice problem directly using Abraham Wald's statistical decision theory, taking into account the ambiguity that arises from identification problems under weak but justifiable assumptions."--BOOK JACKET.
The book presents in a rigorous and thorough manner the main elements of Charles Manski's research on partial identification of probability distributions. The approach to inference that runs throughout the book is deliberately conservative and thoroughly nonparametric. There is an enormous scope for fruitful inference using data and assumptions that partially identify population parameters.
Almost everyone would like to see the enactment of sound, practical measures to help disadvantaged people get off welfare and find jobs at decent wages, and over the past quarter-century federal and state governments have struggled to develop just such programs. How do we know whether they are having the hoped-for effect? How do we know whether these vast outlays of money are helping the people they are designed to reach? All welfare and training programs have been subject to professional evaluations, including social experiments and demonstrations designed to test new ideas. This book reviews what we have discovered from past assessments and suggests how welfare and training programs should...
The thirteen papers in "Structural Analysis of Discrete Data" are previously unpublished major research contributions solicited by the editors. They have been specifically prepared to fulfill the two-fold purpose of the volume, first to provide the econometrics student with an overview of the present extent of the subject and to delineate the boundaries of current research, both in terms of methodology and applications. "Coordinated publication of important findings" should, as the editors state, "lower the cost of entry into the field and speed dissemination of recent research into the graduate econometrics classroom."A second purpose of the volume is to communicate results largely reported...
The most crucial choice a high school graduate makes is whether to attend college or to go to work. Here is the most sophisticated study of the complexities behind that decision. Based on a unique data set of nearly 23,000 seniors from more than 1,300 high schools who were tracked over several years, the book treats the following questions in detail: Who goes to college? Does low family income prevent some young people from enrolling, or does scholarship aid offset financial need? How important are scholastic aptitude scores, high school class rank, race, and socioeconomic background in determining college applications and admissions? Do test scores predict success in higher education? Using...
Economists and psychologists have, on the whole, exhibited sharply different perspectives on the elicitation of preferences. Economists, who have made preference the central primitive in their thinking about human behavior, have for the most part rejected elicitation and have instead sought to infer preferences from observations of choice behavior. Psychologists, who have tended to think of preference as a context-determined subjective construct, have embraced elicitation as their dominant approach to measurement. This volume, based on a symposium organized by Daniel McFadden at the University of California at Berkeley, provides a provocative and constructive engagement between economists and psychologists on the elicitation of preferences.