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Preferences are the point of departure for economic analysis. Despite myriad experiments designed to characterize preferences, no consensus has been reached. In The Evolutionary Foundation of Preferences Arthur J. Robson and Larry Samuelson examine how economic preferences might be shaped by biological evolution. Theorizing that each of us is descended from a line of ancestors who were able to survive and to reproduce, they analyze how this fact may have affected modern preferences. Drawing on demographic models, they explain how different preferences induce different behaviors which lead toe different growth rates among respective subpopulations. People characterized by inducing the highest growth rate eventually comprise the overwhelming proportion of the population. Examining neuroscientific evidence that points to a cardinal or hedonic interpretation of utility, the authors discuss the implications of these interpretations and the challenges raised for welfare economics.
Bridging the gap between undergraduate and graduate macroeconomics, this book approaches DSGE models from a unified perspective based on the concept of competitive equilibrium (CE) and the equivalent social planner problem (SPP). Equilibrium conditions derived from a CE are used to motivate the methods that solve the models. A guided focus on Dynare enables students to solve problems while avoiding the typical pitfalls associated with the software. The approach is 'we have a need and here's a tool that solves it' instead of 'here's a tool and let's look for an application.' It is consistent with current practices: define an equilibrium, characterize its solution, find its steady state, approximate the equilibrium conditions, and solve for its policy functions. This book is for the student who wants to follow current macroeconomic research and build on that to gain a competitive edge in creating and solving empirical models with real-world applicability.
Empirical Bayes methods as envisioned by Herbert Robbins are becoming an essential element of the statistical toolkit. In Empirical Bayes: Tools, Rules, and Duals, Roger Koenker and Jiaying Gu offer a unified view of these methods. They stress recent computational developments for nonparametric estimation of mixture models, not only for the traditional Gaussian and Poisson settings, but for a wide range of other applications. Providing numerous illustrations where empirical Bayes methods are attractive, the authors give a detailed discussion of computational methods, enabling readers to apply the methods in new settings.
In the winter of 2021, the Swedish Nobel Foundation organized a Nobel symposium 'One Hundred Years of Game Theory' to commemorate the publication of famous mathematician Emile Borel's 'La théorie du jeu et les équations intégrales à noyau symétrique'. The symposium gathered roughly forty of the world's most prominent scholars ranging from mathematical foundations to applications in economics, political science, computer science, biology, sociology, and other fields. One Hundred Years of Game Theory brings together their writings to summarize and put in perspective the main achievements of game theory in the last one hundred years. They address past achievements, taking stock of what has been accomplished and contemplating potential future developments and challenges. Offering cross-disciplinary discussions between eminent researchers including five Nobel laureates, one Fields medalist and two Gödel prize winners, the contributors provide a fascinating landscape of game theory and its wide range of applications.
Every five years, the World Congress of the Econometric Society brings together scholars from around the world. Leading scholars present state-of-the-art overviews of their areas of research, offering newcomers access to key research in economics. Advances in Economics and Econometrics: Twelfth World Congress consist of papers and commentaries presented at the Twelfth World Congress of the Econometric Society. This two-volume set includes surveys and interpretations of key developments in economics and econometrics, and discussion of future directions for a variety of topics, covering both theory and application. The first volume addresses such topics as contract theory, industrial organization, health and human capital, as well as racial justice, while the second volume includes theoretical and applied papers on climate change, time series econometrics, and causal inference. These papers are invaluable for experienced economists seeking to broaden their knowledge or young economists new to the field.
This book aims, primarily, to introduce concepts in welfare economics and public economics and will be useful for students in these courses. It provides unified approaches to the evaluation of equality, depolarization, and tax progressivity, three highly important aspects of social wellness. Interconnections among the three seemingly unrelated welfare characteristics are rigorously analyzed in the book, while addressing the questions: What notions of progressivity ensure that an after-tax or post-subsidy income distribution is regarded as more equal than its before-tax or pre-subsidy counterpart? How can depolarization be related to this enquiry? The book takes a sharp and in-depth look also at the questions of equal sacrifice in taxation, incidence of taxation on deprivation, policy implications of alternative taxation schemes, and alternative economic allocation rules. In order to aid students to the best possible extent, it provides non-technical explanations and is enriched by analytical and numerical examples and graphical illustrations of important concepts.
Every five years, the World Congress of the Econometric Society brings together scholars from around the world. Leading scholars present state-of-the-art overviews of their areas of research, offering newcomers access to key research in economics. Advances in Economics and Econometrics: Twelfth World Congress consist of papers and commentaries presented at the Twelfth World Congress of the Econometric Society. This two-volume set includes surveys and interpretations of key developments in economics and econometrics, and discussion of future directions for a variety of topics, covering both theory and application. The first volume addresses such topics as contract theory, industrial organization, health and human capital, as well as racial justice, while the second volume includes theoretical and applied papers on climate change, time series econometrics, and causal inference. These papers are invaluable for experienced economists seeking to broaden their knowledge or young economists new to the field.
Dynamic programming (DP) is a sub-field of optimization concerned with sequential decision making over time. The essential ideas of DP have been adopted in many applications, from robotics and AI to the sequencing of DNA. It is used around the world to control aircraft, route shipping, test products, recommend information on media platforms and solve major research problems. Dynamic Programming: Finite States treats the theory of dynamic programming and its applications in economics, finance, and operations research. It contains classical results on dynamic programming as well as extensions created by researchers and practitioners as they wrestle with formulating and solving dynamic models that can explain patterns observed in data. Adopting an abstract framework that provides great generality, this book facilitates rapid progress to the research frontier by combining rigorous theory with numerous applications, many solved exercises, and detailed open-source computer code.
This book studies the methodological revolution that has resulted in economists' mathematical market models being exported across the social sciences. The ensuing process of economics imperialism has struck fear into subject specialists worried that their disciplinary knowledge will subsequently count for less. Yet even though mathematical market models facilitate important abstract thought experiments, they are no substitute for carefully contextualised empirical investigations of real social phenomena. The two exist on completely different ontological planes, producing very different types of explanation.
In this deeply researched and wide-ranging intellectual history, Matthew Watson surveys the evolution of modern economics and its modelling methodology. With its origins in Jevons and Robbins and its culmination in Samuelson, Arrow and Debreu, he charts the escape from reality that has allowed economists' hypothetical mathematical models to speak to increasingly self-referential mathematical truths. These are shown to perform badly as social truths, consequently imposing strict epistemic limits on economics imperialism.
The book is a formidable analysis of the epistemic limitations of modern-day economics and marks a significant counter to its methodology's encroachment across the wider social sciences.
Financial Econometrics is a contribution to modern financial econometrics, overviewing both theory and application. It covers, in detail, three important topics in the field that have recently drawn the attention of the academic community and practitioners, with low-frequency data (trend determination, bubble detection, and factor-augmented regressions) and examines various topics in high-frequency financial econometrics with continuous time models and discretized data. Also included are the estimation of stochastic volatility models, posterior-based hypothesis testing, and posterior-based model selection. Exploring topics at the forefront of research in the field of financial econometrics, this book offers an accessible introduction to the research and provides the groundwork for the development of new econometric techniques.
Models of stochastic choice are studied in decision theory, discrete choice econometrics, behavioral economics and psychology. Numerous experiments show that perception of stimuli is not deterministic, but stochastic (randomly determined). A growing body of evidence indicates that the same is true of economic choices. Whether trials are separated by days or minutes, the fraction of choice reversals is substantial. Stochastic Choice Theory offers a systematic introduction to these models, unifying insights from various fields. It explores mathematical models of stochastic choice, which have a variety of applications in game theory, industrial organization, labor economics, marketing, and experimental economics. Offering a systematic introduction to the field, this book builds up from scratch without any prior knowledge requirements and surveys recent developments, bringing readers to the frontier of research.
Economists have long studied policy choice by social planners aiming to maximize population welfare. Whether performing theoretical studies or applied analyses, researchers have generally assumed that the planner knows enough about the choice environment to be able to determine an optimal action. However, the consequences of decisions are often highly uncertain. Discourse on Social Planning under Uncertainty addresses the failure of research to come to grips with this uncertainty. Combining research across three fields – welfare economics, decision theory, and econometrics – this impressive study offers a comprehensive treatment that fleshes out a 'worldview' and juxtaposes it with other viewpoints. Building on multiple case studies, ranging from medical treatment to climate policy, the book explains analytical methods and how to apply them, providing a foundation on which future interdisciplinary work can build.
Focusing on methods for data that are ordered in time, this textbook provides a comprehensive guide to analyzing time series data using modern techniques from data science. It is specifically tailored to economics and finance applications, aiming to provide students with rigorous training. Chapters cover Bayesian approaches, nonparametric smoothing methods, machine learning, and continuous time econometrics. Theoretical and empirical exercises, concise summaries, bolded key terms, and illustrative examples are included throughout to reinforce key concepts and bolster understanding. Ancillary materials include an instructor's manual with solutions and additional exercises, PowerPoint lecture slides, and datasets. With its clear and accessible style, this textbook is an essential tool for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in economics, finance, and statistics.
Applied econometrics uses the tools of theoretical econometrics and real-word data to develop predictive models and assess economic theories. Due to the complex nature of such analysis, various assumptions are often not understood by those people who rely on it. The danger of this is that economic policies can be assessed favourably to suit a particular political agenda and forecasts can be generated to match the needs of a particular customer. Ethics in Econometrics argues that econometricians need to be aware of potential ethical pitfalls when carrying out their analysis and that they need to be encouraged to avoid them. Using a range of empirical examples and detailed discussions of real cases, this book provides a guide for research practices in econometrics, illustrating why it is imperative that econometricians act ethically in terms of the way they conduct their analysis and treat their data.
Accessible, concise, and interactive, this book introduces the mathematical methods that are indispensable in economics and finance. Fully updated to be as student friendly as possible, this edition contains extensive problems, worked examples and exercises (with full solutions at the end of the book). Two brand new chapters cover coupled systems of recurrence/differential equations, and matrix diagonalisation. All topics are motivated by problems from economics and finance, demonstrating to students how they can apply the mathematical techniques covered. For undergraduate students of economics, mathematics, or both, this book will be welcomed for its clarity and breadth and the many opportunities it provides for readers to practise and test their understanding.
An emerging field in statistics, distributional regression facilitates the modelling of the complete conditional distribution, rather than just the mean. This book introduces generalized additive models for location, scale and shape (GAMLSS) – one of the most important classes of distributional regression. Taking a broad perspective, the authors consider penalized likelihood inference, Bayesian inference, and boosting as potential ways of estimating models and illustrate their usage in complex applications. Written by the international team who developed GAMLSS, the text's focus on practical questions and problems sets it apart. Case studies demonstrate how researchers in statistics and other data-rich disciplines can use the model in their work, exploring examples ranging from fetal ultrasounds to social media performance metrics. The R code and data sets for the case studies are available on the book's companion website, allowing for replication and further study.
Causation in the Law of the World Trade Organization: An Econometric Approach is for both scholars and practitioners of WTO law with an interest in the causal questions that WTO law raises. Assuming no prior knowledge of causal philosophy or statistical analysis, Dr Gascoigne discusses the problems in the current approach to causation in the WTO jurisprudence and proposes an alternative methodology that draws on causal philosophy and econometric analysis. The book demonstrates how this methodology could be harnessed to make causal determinations for the purpose of implementing trade remedies and to make out claims of serious prejudice. It also argues that the methodology could be helpful for assessing the impact of domestic legislation on policy objectives under the General Exceptions and the Technical Barriers to Trade Agreement as well as for calculating the amount of retaliation permissible under the Dispute Settlement Understanding.
While the Poisson distribution is a classical statistical model for count data, the distributional model hinges on the constraining property that its mean equal its variance. This text instead introduces the Conway-Maxwell-Poisson distribution and motivates its use in developing flexible statistical methods based on its distributional form. This two-parameter model not only contains the Poisson distribution as a special case but, in its ability to account for data over- or under-dispersion, encompasses both the geometric and Bernoulli distributions. The resulting statistical methods serve in a multitude of ways, from an exploratory data analysis tool, to a flexible modeling impetus for varied statistical methods involving count data. The first comprehensive reference on the subject, this text contains numerous illustrative examples demonstrating R code and output. It is essential reading for academics in statistics and data science, as well as quantitative researchers and data analysts in economics, biostatistics and other applied disciplines.
This book analyzes the following four distinct, although not dissimilar, areas of social choice theory and welfare economics: nonstrategic choice, Harsanyi's aggregation theorems, distributional ethics and strategic choice. While for aggregation of individual ranking of social states, whether the persons behave strategically or non-strategically, the decision making takes place under complete certainty; in the Harsanyi framework uncertainty has a significant role in the decision making process. Another ingenious characteristic of the book is the discussion of ethical approaches to evaluation of inequality arising from unequal distributions of achievements in the different dimensions of human well-being. Given its wide coverage, combined with newly added materials, end-chapter problems and bibliographical notes, the book will be helpful material for students and researchers interested in this frontline area research. Its lucid exposition, along with non-technical and graphical illustration of the concepts, use of numerical examples, makes the book a useful text.