Journal articles: 'Unobserved ability'

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Belzil, Christian, and Jorgen Hansen. "Unobserved Ability and the Return to Schooling." Econometrica 70, no. 5 (September 2002): 2075–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1468-0262.00365.

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Blackburn, M., and D. Neumark. "Unobserved Ability, Efficiency Wages, and Interindustry Wage Differentials." Quarterly Journal of Economics 107, no. 4 (November 1, 1992): 1421–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2118394.

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Gittleman, Maury, and Brooks Pierce. "Inter-Industry Wage Differentials Job Content and Unobserved Ability." ILR Review 64, no. 2 (January 2011): 356–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/001979391106400208.

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BJÖRKLUND, ANDERS, BERNT BRATSBERG, TOR ERIKSSON, MARKUS JÄNTTI, and ODDBJÖRN RAAUM. "Interindustry Wage Differentials and Unobserved Ability: Siblings Evidence from Five Countries." Industrial Relations 46, no. 1 (January 2007): 171–202. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-232x.2007.00461.x.

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Tarvid, Alexander. "Unobserved Heterogeneity in Overeducation Models: Is Personality More Important than Ability?" Procedia Economics and Finance 5 (2013): 722–31. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/s2212-5671(13)00084-1.

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Ding, Weili, and Steven F. Lehrer. "Understanding the role of time-varying unobserved ability heterogeneity in education production." Economics of Education Review 40 (June 2014): 55–75. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.econedurev.2014.01.004.

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Bradlow, Eric T. "Teacher’s Corner: Negative Information and The Three-Parameter Logistic Model." Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics 21, no. 2 (June 1996): 179–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.3102/10769986021002179.

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The 3-parameter logistic model is commonly used to describe the relationship among an unobserved latent trait (ability), unobserved item properties, and an observed binary outcome. We show that for certain values of the item properties and latent ability, the observed information about ability contained in the binary response is negative. This result has implications for maximization procedures, such as Newton-Raphson; approximate sampling methods, such as the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm; and Bayesian adaptive testing. All of these typically utilize the observed information. This result is contrasted with the fact that observed negative information does not occur in the limiting case with no guessing (2-parameter logistic model). The probability of negative information is expressed by a simple formula. This research extends the work of Samejima (1973) and Yen, Burket, and Sykes (1991).

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Gao, Jianfei, Mohamed A. Zahran, Amit Sheoran, Sonia Fahmy, and Bruno Ribeiro. "Infinity Learning: Learning Markov Chains from Aggregate Steady-State Observations." Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence 34, no. 04 (April 3, 2020): 3922–29. http://dx.doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v34i04.5806.

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We consider the task of learning a parametric Continuous Time Markov Chain (CTMC) sequence model without examples of sequences, where the training data consists entirely of aggregate steady-state statistics. Making the problem harder, we assume that the states we wish to predict are unobserved in the training data. Specifically, given a parametric model over the transition rates of a CTMC and some known transition rates, we wish to extrapolate its steady state distribution to states that are unobserved. A technical roadblock to learn a CTMC from its steady state has been that the chain rule to compute gradients will not work over the arbitrarily long sequences necessary to reach steady state —from where the aggregate statistics are sampled. To overcome this optimization challenge, we propose ∞-SGD, a principled stochastic gradient descent method that uses randomly-stopped estimators to avoid infinite sums required by the steady state computation, while learning even when only a subset of the CTMC states can be observed. We apply ∞-SGD to a real-world testbed and synthetic experiments showcasing its accuracy, ability to extrapolate the steady state distribution to unobserved states under unobserved conditions (heavy loads, when training under light loads), and succeeding in difficult scenarios where even a tailor-made extension of existing methods fails.

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Assunção, Juliano J., and Maitreesh Ghatak. "Can unobserved heterogeneity in farmer ability explain the inverse relationship between farm size and productivity." Economics Letters 80, no. 2 (August 2003): 189–94. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/s0165-1765(03)00091-0.

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Taber, Christopher R. "The Rising College Premium in the Eighties: Return to College or Return to Unobserved Ability?" Review of Economic Studies 68, no. 3 (July 2001): 665–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-937x.00185.

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Arslanagic-Kalajdzic, Maja, Vesna Žabkar, and Adamantios Diamantopoulos. "The unobserved signaling ability of marketing accountability: can suppliers’ marketing accountability enhance business customers’ value perceptions?" Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing 34, no. 1 (February 13, 2019): 166–75. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/jbim-05-2018-0156.

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PurposeMarketing accountability is currently receiving increased attention from scholars and practitioners alike, with its usage mostly being linked to the improved position of marketing within the firm and to better firm performance. The purpose of this study is to assess whether a supplier’s marketing accountability also has an unobserved signaling effect on customer perceived value.Design/methodology/approachBased on a survey of advertising agency-client dyads, the authors develop and test a multilevel model that assesses the relationship between the supplier’s marketing accountability and perceived value of the client.FindingsEmpirical results indicate that marketing accountability of the agency is positively related to client-firm perceived value, that is marketing accountability also has a positive signaling effect on customers’ value perceptions.Originality/valueThis study provides novel insights on how perceptions of customer value are created in business relationships. More specifically, it highlights that marketing accountability of a supplier positively contributes to shaping clients’ value perceptions. Implications for marketing theory and practice, focused on the need for building, improving and sustaining marketing accountability within the firm and its relevance for value, are discussed and future research directions are identified.

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Stock, Brian C., Eric J. Ward, James T. Thorson, Jason E. Jannot, and Brice X. Semmens. "The utility of spatial model-based estimators of unobserved bycatch." ICES Journal of Marine Science 76, no. 1 (October 25, 2018): 255–67. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/icesjms/fsy153.

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Abstract Quantifying effects of fishing on non-targeted (bycatch) species is an important management and conservation issue. Bycatch estimates are typically calculated using data collected by on-board observers, but observer programmes are costly and therefore often only cover a small percentage of the fishery. The challenge is then to estimate bycatch for the unobserved fishing activity. The status quo for most fisheries is to assume the ratio of bycatch to effort is constant and multiply this ratio by the effort in the unobserved activity (ratio estimator). We used a dataset with 100% observer coverage, 35 440 hauls from the US west coast groundfish trawl fishery, to evaluate the ratio estimator against methods that utilize fine-scale spatial information: generalized additive models (GAMs) and random forests. Applied to 15 species representing a range of bycatch rates, including spatial locations improved model predictive ability, whereas including effort-associated covariates generally did not. Random forests performed best for all species (lower root mean square error), but were slightly biased (overpredicting total bycatch). Thus, the choice of bycatch estimation method involves a tradeoff between bias and precision, and which method is optimal may depend on the species bycatch rate and how the estimates are to be used.

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Webbink, Dinand, David Hay, and Peter M. Visscher. "Does Sharing the Same Class in School Improve Cognitive Abilities of Twins?" Twin Research and Human Genetics 10, no. 4 (August 1, 2007): 573–80. http://dx.doi.org/10.1375/twin.10.4.573.

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AbstractThis article analyzes the effect of classroom separation of twins on their cognitive abilities, measured at different ages in Dutch primary education. We use a large longitudinal school-based sample of twins and their classmates. The analysis tries to reduce the bias by unobserved factors due to the nonrandom assignment of twins by taking into account differences in school environment, previous test scores and variation in class assignment between years. We find that classroom separation matters for language in Grade 2. Nonseparated twins score higher on language, and the difference is larger for same-sex pairs. This finding is robust for various methods that take unobserved effects into account. In addition, there is some evidence for higher scores in arithmetic in Grade 2. For the higher grades we find no effect of classroom separation on cognitive ability. In the analysis of the effect of a separation of at least 3 years we find that separation increases language performance between Grade 6 and 8 for opposite-sex pairs.

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Quinn, Courtney, Terence J. O'Kane, and Vassili Kitsios. "Application of a local attractor dimension to reduced space strongly coupled data assimilation for chaotic multiscale systems." Nonlinear Processes in Geophysics 27, no. 1 (February 19, 2020): 51–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.5194/npg-27-51-2020.

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Abstract. The basis and challenge of strongly coupled data assimilation (CDA) is the accurate representation of cross-domain covariances between various coupled subsystems with disparate spatio-temporal scales, where often one or more subsystems are unobserved. In this study, we explore strong CDA using ensemble Kalman filtering methods applied to a conceptual multiscale chaotic model consisting of three coupled Lorenz attractors. We introduce the use of the local attractor dimension (i.e. the Kaplan–Yorke dimension, dimKY) to prescribe the rank of the background covariance matrix which we construct using a variable number of weighted covariant Lyapunov vectors (CLVs). Specifically, we consider the ability to track the nonlinear trajectory of each of the subsystems with different variants of sparse observations, relying only on the cross-domain covariance to determine an accurate analysis for tracking the trajectory of the unobserved subdomain. We find that spanning the global unstable and neutral subspaces is not sufficient at times where the nonlinear dynamics and intermittent linear error growth along a stable direction combine. At such times a subset of the local stable subspace is also needed to be represented in the ensemble. In this regard the local dimKY provides an accurate estimate of the required rank. Additionally, we show that spanning the full space does not improve performance significantly relative to spanning only the subspace determined by the local dimension. Where weak coupling between subsystems leads to covariance collapse in one or more of the unobserved subsystems, we apply a novel modified Kalman gain where the background covariances are scaled by their Frobenius norm. This modified gain increases the magnitude of the innovations and the effective dimension of the unobserved domains relative to the strength of the coupling and timescale separation. We conclude with a discussion on the implications for higher-dimensional systems.

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Sun, Qian. "Estimating the earnings returns to exam-measured unobserved ability in China's urban labor market: Evidence for 2002–2013." China Economic Review 53 (February 2019): 180–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.chieco.2018.08.012.

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Lazarus, Amit, and Nabil Khattab. "The unobserved power of context: Can context moderate the effect of expectations on educational achievement?" Ethnicities 18, no. 4 (May 31, 2018): 541–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1468796818777548.

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There is growing evidence that shows that social context is becoming less significant in influencing educational achievements and expectations. Additionally, evidence indicates that expectations are high across the board and becoming of declining significance to educational achievement. In light of this, we reexamine and offer an alternative to the renowned linear models connecting background variables to scholarly achievement via pupils' educational expectation. Analysis of GCSE scores, using three consecutive waves of the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England, reveals that the verity of this classical claim is dependent on occupational class, ethnic origin, and school socio-economic status level. These results thus confirm an unrecognized effect of family and school background variables on achievement—not only to engender expectations but also to moderate their influence. This recognition expands and deepens understanding of inequality in educational achievement and social mobility by treating expectations as a resource and analytically distinguishing between the ability of a social group or a certain school to attain or create high expectations and their ability to capitalize on it and translate these into achievements. We find that in many cases, expectations still possess strong potential to transform into achievement, while in others they are high across the board and rather inconsequential.

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17

Feng, Xunan, Jin Xu, Ying Wang, and Chunyan Tang. "The competition effect of new entry on mutual fund incumbents in China." China Finance Review International 7, no. 1 (February 20, 2017): 98–113. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/cfri-04-2016-0020.

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Purpose Using the sample between 2005 and 2011, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of a new fund entry on incumbents using the overlap measure in portfolio holdings. Design/methodology/approach Empirical methodology is used in this study. Findings The authors find that incumbents that have a higher overlap with the entrants underperform subsequently. Based on the characteristic-based approach of Daniel et al. (1997), the authors find that the characteristic selectivity component is negatively correlated with the overlap measure, and thereby the decline in performance is driven by the stock-picking ability. The authors also discuss the unobserved actions of incumbents using the approach proposed by Kacperczyk et al. (2008) and find that incumbent unobserved actions do not benefit mutual fund investors in China. Finally the authors find that investors respond to the supply-side competition between entrants and incumbents quickly. These findings help us understand the mutual fund completion in China. Originality/value The findings in this study can help scholars, industry experts and regulatory authorities to understand the effect of competition in Chinese mutual fund industry.

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18

Pacifico, Antonio. "Structural Panel Bayesian VAR Model to Deal with Model Misspecification and Unobserved Heterogeneity Problems." Econometrics 7, no. 1 (March 11, 2019): 8. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/econometrics7010008.

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This paper provides an overview of a time-varying Structural Panel Bayesian Vector Autoregression model that deals with model misspecification and unobserved heterogeneity problems in applied macroeconomic analyses when studying time-varying relationships and dynamic interdependencies among countries and variables. I discuss what its distinctive features are, what it is used for, and how it can be analytically derived. I also describe how it is estimated and how structural spillovers and shock identification are performed. The model is empirically applied to a set of developed European economies to illustrate the functioning and the ability of the model. The paper also discusses more recent studies that have used multivariate dynamic macro-panels to evaluate idiosyncratic business cycles, policy-making, and spillover effects among different sectors and countries.

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Eigbiremolen, Godstime Osekhebhen. "Estimating Private School Premium for Primary School Children in Ethiopia: Evidence from Individual-level Panel Data." Progress in Development Studies 20, no. 1 (December 17, 2019): 26–44. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1464993419889708.

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This article presents the first value-added model of private school effect in Ethiopia, using the unique Young Lives longitudinal data. I found a substantial and statistically significant private school premium (about 0.5 standard deviation) in Maths, but not in Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT). Private school premium works for both low and high ability children. The results are robust to sorting on unobserved ability, grouping on lag structures and transfer between private and public schools. Combined with available contextual data, empirical evidence suggests that the effectiveness of private primary schools may be due to more learning time and teacher’s attention enjoyed by students. I also attempted to contribute methodologically to the literature by directly testing the structural assumption underpinning value-added models.

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Lepage, Kyle Q., and Sujith Vijayan. "A Time-Series Model of Phase Amplitude Cross Frequency Coupling and Comparison of Spectral Characteristics with Neural Data." BioMed Research International 2015 (2015): 1–8. http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2015/140837.

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Stochastic processes that exhibit cross-frequency coupling (CFC) are introduced. The ability of these processes to model observed CFC in neural recordings is investigated by comparison with published spectra. One of the proposed models, based on multiplying a pulsatile function of a low-frequency oscillation (θ) with an unobserved and high-frequency component, yields a process with a spectrum that is consistent with observation. Other models, such as those employing a biphasic pulsatile function of a low-frequency oscillation, are demonstrated to be less suitable. We introduce the full stochastic process time series model as a summation of three component weak-sense stationary (WSS) processes, namely,θ,γ, andη, withηa1/fαnoise process. Theγprocess is constructed as a product of a latent and unobserved high-frequency processxwith a function of the lagged, low-frequency oscillatory component (θ). After demonstrating that the model process is WSS, an appropriate method of simulation is introduced based upon the WSS property. This work may be of interest to researchers seeking to connect inhibitory and excitatory dynamics directly to observation in a model that accounts for known temporal dependence or to researchers seeking to examine what can occur in a multiplicative time-domain CFC mechanism.

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Perretti, Charles T., Jonathan J. Deroba, and Christopher M. Legault. "Simulation testing methods for estimating misreported catch in a state-space stock assessment model." ICES Journal of Marine Science 77, no. 3 (March 12, 2020): 911–20. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/icesjms/fsaa034.

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Abstract State-space stock assessment models have become increasingly common in recent years due to their ability to estimate unobserved variables and explicitly model multiple sources of random error. Therefore, they may be able to better estimate unobserved processes such as misreported fishery catch. We examined whether a state-space assessment model was able to estimate misreported catch in a simulated fishery. We tested three formulations of the estimation model, which exhibit increasing complexity: (i) assuming no misreporting, (ii) assuming misreporting is constant over time, and (iii) assuming misreporting follows a random walk. We tested these three estimation models against simulations using each of the three assumptions and an additional fourth assumption of uniform random misreporting over time. Overall, the worst estimation errors occurred when misreporting was ignored while it was in fact occurring, while there was a relatively small cost for estimating misreporting when it was not occurring. Estimates of population scale and fishing mortality rate were particularly sensitive to misreporting assumptions. Furthermore, in the uniform random scenario, the relatively simple model that assumed misreporting was fixed across ages and time was more accurate than the more complicated random walk model, despite the increased flexibility of the latter.

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Alka, Kilishi Adamu. "Is There Really a Foreign Ownership Productivity Advantage? Evidence from Nigerian Manufacturing Firms." Journal of African Economies 29, no. 5 (July 6, 2020): 475–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jae/ejaa003.

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ABSTRACT The role of foreign ownership of an enterprise in impacting their performance is a vital policy issue for Africa. In this paper, panel data for manufacturing firms is used to investigate that role in Nigeria. After controlling for unobserved firm heterogeneity, inputs simultaneity, measurement errors and possible selection bias, I find that foreign ownership has a positive, but statistically insignificant, effect on total factor productivity (TFP). However, foreign-owned firms operate on a far larger scale than domestic ones, with much higher levels of employment, capital intensity and labour productivity. As it is labour productivity that determines the ability of firms to pay higher wages, the evidence presented in this paper suggests it is their ability to operate at higher scale, rather than having higher TFP, is what characterises foreign-owned firms in Nigeria.

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Volinskiy, Dmitriy, John C. Bergstrom, Christopher M. Cornwell, and Thomas P. Holmes. "A Pseudo-Sequential Choice Model for Valuing Multi-Attribute Environmental Policies or Programs in Contingent Valuation Applications." Agricultural and Resource Economics Review 39, no. 1 (February 2010): 9–21. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1068280500001799.

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The assumption of independence of irrelevant alternatives in a sequential contingent valuation format should be questioned. Statistically, most valuation studies treat nonindependence as a consequence of unobserved individual effects. Another approach is to consider an inferential process in which any particular choice is part of a general choosing strategy of a survey respondent. A stochastic model is suggested, consistent with the reflexivity, transitivity, and continuity axioms of utility analysis. An application of this theoretical model to the valuation of watershed ecosystem restoration demonstrates that an empirical model recognizing reflexivity and transitivity, and also allowing for continuity, shows the highest in-sample predictive ability.

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Feigenbaum, James J., and Hui Ren Tan. "The Return to Education in the Mid-Twentieth Century: Evidence from Twins." Journal of Economic History 80, no. 4 (September 30, 2020): 1101–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0022050720000492.

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What was the return to education in the United States at mid-century? In 1940, the correlation between years of schooling and earnings was relatively low. In this article, we estimate the causal return to schooling in 1940, constructing a large linked sample of twin brothers to account for differences in unobserved ability and family background. We find that each additional year of schooling increased labor earnings by approximately 4 percent, about half the return found for more recent cohorts in twins studies. These returns were evident both within and across occupations and were higher for sons from lower socio-economic status families.

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PARK, KIHONG, and DOOSEOK JANG. "THE WAGE EFFECTS OF OVER-EDUCATION AMONG YOUNG STEM GRADUATES." Singapore Economic Review 64, no. 05 (June 21, 2017): 1351–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.1142/s0217590817500059.

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Using data from the 2010 Graduates Occupational Mobility Survey, this paper examines the wage effects of over-education (OE) among graduates in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines at the early stage of their careers. In the pooled OLS analysis, the negative correlation between OE and wages remains even if we were to estimate an augmented specification where OE is disaggregated according to perceived skill mismatch. However, the pooled OLS estimates are changed dramatically when we control for unobserved individual heterogeneity (i.e., ability) using the panel FE estimation procedure; namely, reduced coefficients in the wage equation compared to pooled OLS estimation.

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Blundell, Richard. "What Have We Learned from Structural Models?" American Economic Review 107, no. 5 (May 1, 2017): 287–92. http://dx.doi.org/10.1257/aer.p20171116.

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A structural economic model is one where the structure of decision making is incorporated in the model specification. Structural models aim to identify three distinct, but related, objects: (i) structural “deep” parameters; (ii) underlying mechanisms; (iii) policy counterfactuals. The ability to provide counterfactual predictions sets structural models apart from reduced-form models. The focus is on studies that allow a better understanding of the mechanisms underlying observed behavior and that provide reliable insights about policy counterfactuals. Emphasis is given to models that minimize assumptions on the structural function and on unobserved heterogeneity and approaches that align structural and “reduced form” moments.

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Herresthal, Claudia. "Performance-Based Rankings and School Quality." Economic Journal 130, no. 630 (April 9, 2020): 1729–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/ej/ueaa036.

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Abstract I study students’ inferences about school quality from performance-based rankings in a dynamic setting. Schools differ in location and unobserved quality; students differ in location and ability. Short-lived students observe a school ranking as a signal about schools’ relative qualities, but this signal also depends on the abilities of schools’ past intakes. Students apply to schools, trading off expected quality against proximity. Oversubscribed schools select applicants based on an admission rule. In steady-state equilibrium, I find that rankings are more informative if more able applicants are given priority in admissions or if students care less about distance to school.

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Elliott, Matthew, Benjamin Golub, and Andrei Kirilenko. "How Sharing Information Can Garble Experts' Advice." American Economic Review 104, no. 5 (May 1, 2014): 463–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.1257/aer.104.5.463.

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We model the strategic provision of advice in environments where a principal's optimal action depends on an unobserved, binary state of interest. Experts receive signals about the state and each recommends an action. The principal and all experts dislike making errors in their decision and recommendations, respectively, but may have different costs of different errors. Is it in the principal's interest to let experts share information? Although sharing improves experts' ability to avoid errors, we identify a simple environment in which any principal, regardless of how he trades off the different errors, is worse off if he permits information sharing.

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Ellison, Glenn, and Ashley Swanson. "The Gender Gap in Secondary School Mathematics at High Achievement Levels: Evidence from the American Mathematics Competitions." Journal of Economic Perspectives 24, no. 2 (May 1, 2010): 109–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.1257/jep.24.2.109.

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This paper uses a new data source, American Mathematics Competitions, to examine the gender gap among high school students at very high achievement levels. The data bring out several new facts. There is a large gender gap that widens dramatically at percentiles above those that can be examined using standard data sources. An analysis of unobserved heterogeneity indicates that there is only moderate variation in the gender gap across schools. The highest achieving girls in the U.S. are concentrated in a very small set of elite schools, suggesting that almost all girls with the ability to reach high math achievement levels are not doing so.

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Langley, Pat, Ben Meadows, Alfredo Gabaldon, and Richard Heald. "Abductive understanding of dialogues about joint activities." Interaction Studies 15, no. 3 (December 31, 2014): 426–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/is.15.3.04lan.

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This paper examines the task of understanding dialogues in terms of the mental states of the participating agents. We present a motivating example that clarifies the challenges this problem involves and then outline a theory of dialogue interpretation based on abductive inference of these unobserved beliefs and goals, incremental construction of explanations, and reliance on domain-independent knowledge. After this, we describe UMBRA, an implementation of the theory that embodies these assumptions. We report experiments with the system that demonstrate its ability to accurately infer the conversants’ mental states even when some speech acts are unavailable. We conclude by reviewing related research on dialogue and discussing avenues for future study.

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Ringo, Daniel. "Parental Credit Constraints and Child College Attendance." Education Finance and Policy 14, no. 4 (September 2019): 548–71. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/edfp_a_00259.

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Parents in the United States frequently supplement the student loans available to their children by cosigning on a loan, borrowing against their home equity, or with unsecured debt in their own names. This paper investigates whether some students are constrained from attending and completing college by their parents’ lack of access to credit markets by linking individual parental credit scores to their children's educational attainment. I find that good parental credit significantly improves the child's probability of attending college. Suggestive evidence is provided that the estimated relationship may be causal and not biased by omitted factors, such as unobserved ability or other personality characteristics.

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Kretschmer, Tobias, Eugenio J. Miravete, and José C. Pernías. "Competitive Pressure and the Adoption of Complementary Innovations." American Economic Review 102, no. 4 (June 1, 2012): 1540–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.1257/aer.102.4.1540.

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Liberalization of the European automobile distribution system in 2002 limits the ability of manufacturers to impose vertical restraints, leading to a substantial increase in competitive pressure among dealers. We estimate an equilibrium model of profit maximization to evaluate how dealers change their innovation adoption strategies following the elimination of exclusive territories. Using French data we evaluate the existence of complementarities between the adoption of software applications and the scale of production. Firms view these innovations as substitutes and concentrate their effort in one type of software as they expand their scale of production. Results are robust to the existence of unobserved heterogeneity. (JEL D24, K21, L21, L22, L62, O32)

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Gil-Hernández, Carlos J. "Do Well-off Families Compensate for Low Cognitive Ability? Evidence on Social Inequality in Early Schooling from a Twin Study." Sociology of Education 92, no. 2 (February 10, 2019): 150–75. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0038040719830698.

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This article bridges the literature on educational inequality between and within families to test whether high–socioeconomic status (SES) families compensate for low cognitive ability in the transition to secondary education in Germany. The German educational system of early-ability tracking (at age 10) represents a stringent setting for the compensatory hypothesis. Overall, previous literature offers inconclusive findings. Previous research between families suffers from the misspecification of parental SES and ability, while most within-family research did not stratify the analysis by SES or the ability distribution. To address these issues, I draw from the TwinLife study to implement a twin fixed-effects design that minimizes unobserved confounding. I report two main findings. First, highly educated families do not compensate for twins’ differences in cognitive ability at the bottom of the ability distribution. In the German system of early-ability tracking, advantaged families may have more difficulties to compensate than in countries where educational transitions are less dependent on ability. Second, holding parents’ and children’s cognitive ability constant, pupils from highly educated families are 27% more likely to attend the academic track. This result implies wastage of academic potential for disadvantaged families, challenging the role of cognitive ability as the leading criterion of merit for liberal theories of equal opportunity. These findings point to the importance of other factors that vary between families with different resources and explain educational success, such as noncognitive abilities, risk aversion to downward mobility, and teachers’ bias.

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Pacheco, Gail, and Don Webber. "Job satisfaction: how crucial is participative decision making?" Personnel Review 45, no. 1 (February 1, 2016): 183–200. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/pr-04-2014-0088.

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Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine the role of perceived ability to participate in decision making in the workplace, with respect to job satisfaction. Design/methodology/approach – Data from the fourth wave of the European Value Survey, is utilised, and a bivariate probit model is employed to account for unobserved heterogeneity. Findings – Empirical analysis comparing univariate and bivariate probit models reveals that the results from the former are negatively biased; potentially indicating that prior research may have underestimated the impact of participative decision making (PDM) on job satisfaction. Additionally, it appears clear that the magnitude of the marginal effects for both socio-demographic and work characteristics do not differ when comparing workers with above and below average participation. More importantly, the authors find a substantial negative marginal effect of below average participation on job satisfaction (close to three times the magnitude of the next largest marginal effect estimated in the model), indicating how crucial it is for employers to actively pursue programmes that enhance PDM. Originality/value – This study contributes to the growing literature aimed at understanding drivers of satisfaction in the workplace. Adding to the scant empirical investigation of the influence of PDM on job satisfaction, the authors find strong evidence of a direct and positive impact, which is further amplified after controlling for unobserved heterogeneity.

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Soule, Terence. "Resilient Individuals Improve Evolutionary Search." Artificial Life 12, no. 1 (January 2006): 17–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/106454606775186437.

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Results from the artificial life community show that under some conditions evolving populations converge on broader, but less fit peaks in the fitness landscape and avoid more fit, but narrower peaks. Results from the evolutionary computation community show that over time genotypes evolve to become more resilient, where resiliency (or genetic robustness) is defined as the ability of an individual to resist the potentially negative effects of genetic operations. This article demonstrates a previously unobserved evolutionary dynamic: in populations initially favoring a low, broad fitness peak, increases in resiliency result in the population shifting to a higher, narrower fitness peak. In these cases increasing resiliency is a necessary precondition for finding narrower peaks.

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Choi, Syngjoo, Shachar Kariv, Wieland Müller, and Dan Silverman. "Who Is (More) Rational?" American Economic Review 104, no. 6 (June 1, 2014): 1518–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.1257/aer.104.6.1518.

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Revealed preference theory offers a criterion for decision-making quality: if decisions are high quality then there exists a utility function the choices maximize. We conduct a large-scale experiment to test for consistency with utility maximization. Consistency scores vary markedly within and across socioeconomic groups. In particular, consistency is strongly related to wealth: A standard deviation increase in consistency is associated with 15–19 percent more household wealth. This association is quantitatively robust to conditioning on correlates of unobserved constraints, preferences, and beliefs. Consistency with utility maximization under laboratory conditions thus captures decision-making ability that applies across domains and influences important real-world outcomes. (JEL D12, D14, D81, D83, D91, G11)

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Levin, Phillip S., Peter Horne, Kelly S. Andrews, and Greg Williams. "An empirical movement model for sixgill sharks in Puget Sound: Combining observed and unobserved behavior." Current Zoology 58, no. 1 (February 1, 2012): 103–15. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/czoolo/58.1.103.

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Abstract Understanding the movement of animals is fundamental to population and community ecology. Historically, it has been difficult to quantify movement patterns of most fishes, but technological advances in acoustic telemetry have increased our abilities to monitor their movement. In this study, we combined small-scale active acoustic tracking with large-scale passive acoustic monitoring to develop an empirical movement model for sixgill sharks in Puget Sound, WA, USA. We began by testing whether a correlated random walk model described the daily movement of sixgills; however, the model failed to capture home-ranging behavior. We added this behavior and used the resultant model (a biased random walk model) to determine whether daily movement patterns are able to explain large-scale seasonal movement. The daily model did not explain the larger-scale patterns of movement observed in the passive monitoring data. In order to create the large-scale patterns, sixgills must have performed behaviors (large, fast directed movements) that were unobserved during small-scale active tracking. In addition, seasonal shifts in location were not captured by the daily model. We added these ‘unobserved’ behaviors to the model and were able to capture large-scale seasonal movement of sixgill sharks over 150 days. The development of empirical models of movement allows researchers to develop hypotheses and test mechanisms responsible for a species movement behavior and spatial distribution. This knowledge will increase our ability to successfully manage species of concern.

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Xia, Lianghao, Chao Huang, Yong Xu, Huance Xu, Xiang Li, and Weiguo Zhang. "Collaborative Reflection-Augmented Autoencoder Network for Recommender Systems." ACM Transactions on Information Systems 40, no. 1 (January 31, 2022): 1–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3467023.

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As the deep learning techniques have expanded to real-world recommendation tasks, many deep neural network based Collaborative Filtering (CF) models have been developed to project user-item interactions into latent feature space, based on various neural architectures, such as multi-layer perceptron, autoencoder, and graph neural networks. However, the majority of existing collaborative filtering systems are not well designed to handle missing data. Particularly, in order to inject the negative signals in the training phase, these solutions largely rely on negative sampling from unobserved user-item interactions and simply treating them as negative instances, which brings the recommendation performance degradation. To address the issues, we develop a C ollaborative R eflection-Augmented A utoencoder N etwork (CRANet), that is capable of exploring transferable knowledge from observed and unobserved user-item interactions. The network architecture of CRANet is formed of an integrative structure with a reflective receptor network and an information fusion autoencoder module, which endows our recommendation framework with the ability of encoding implicit user’s pairwise preference on both interacted and non-interacted items. Additionally, a parametric regularization-based tied-weight scheme is designed to perform robust joint training of the two-stage CRANetmodel. We finally experimentally validate CRANeton four diverse benchmark datasets corresponding to two recommendation tasks, to show that debiasing the negative signals of user-item interactions improves the performance as compared to various state-of-the-art recommendation techniques. Our source code is available at https://github.com/akaxlh/CRANet.

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Benfratello, Luigi, Giuseppe Sorrenti, and Gilberto Turati. "Tracking in the tracks in the Italian public schooling: Inequality patterns in an urban context." ECONOMIA PUBBLICA, no. 2 (August 2020): 39–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.3280/ep2020-002002.

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We study whether, alongside with an explicit tracking system separating students in general versus vocational curricula typical in European countries, the Italian highly centralised public schooling is also characterised by another implicit tracking system, typical of the US, separating students mostly by ability and income within the same track. We pursue this aim by considering the municipality of Turin, a post-industrialised urban context in Northern Italy. We proxy students' ability and skills with the score obtained at the standardised admission test at the School of Economics and Business of the local university. We find evidence of heterogeneity across tracks and schools within the same track, which suggests that the inequality patterns common in the Italian schooling system are affected by both types of tracking. We then discuss the potential sources of this US-style tracking, namely self-selection of better students in better schools, observed and unobserved school characteristics and income stratification. As for the role of income, we find limited evidence of residential segregation, but students from better socio-economic backgrounds travel more, exploiting information on school quality.

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Geven, Sara, and Herman G. van de Werfhorst. "The Role of Intergenerational Networks in Students’ School Performance in Two Differentiated Educational Systems: A Comparison of Between- and Within-Individual Estimates." Sociology of Education 93, no. 1 (October 16, 2019): 40–64. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0038040719882309.

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In this article, we study the relationship between intergenerational networks in classrooms (i.e., relationships among parents in classrooms, and between parents and their children’s classmates) and students’ grades. Using panel data on complete classroom networks of approximately 3,000 adolescents and their parents in approximately 200 classes in both Germany and the Netherlands, we compare estimates based on between-student differences in intergenerational networks (i.e., between-individual estimates) to estimates based on changes students experience in their intergenerational networks over time (i.e., within-individual estimates). We also examine how the relationship between intergenerational networks and grades is contingent on students’ location in the educational system (i.e., their ability track). When considering between-individual estimates, we find some support for a positive relationship between intergenerational networks and grades. However, we find no robust support when considering within-individual estimates. The findings suggest that between-individual estimates, which most previous research has relied on, may be confounded by unobserved differences across individuals. We find little support for variations in these estimates across ability tracks. We discuss the implications for Coleman’s social capital theory on intergenerational closure.

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Papazu, Irina. "Management through hope: an ethnography of Denmark’s Renewable Energy Island." Journal of Organizational Ethnography 5, no. 2 (July 11, 2016): 184–200. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/joe-11-2015-0025.

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Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyse the process of social and technical change that took place between 1997 and 2007 through which Samsø, a rural island of 4,000 inhabitants, became Denmark’s Renewable Energy Island (REI). Design/methodology/approach – Building on ethnographic fieldwork conducted on Samsø in 2013 and 2014, the paper takes as its starting point a citizens’ meeting in which a new renewable energy project is proposed by a municipal coordinator. This meeting, in which the municipal coordinator exhibits a “change management” attitude, fails to win the citizens’ support and becomes an entry point into an investigation of how the REI project developers managed to get the island community to actively support the project. A gateway to the past, the meeting allows the author to ethnographically describe the unobserved events of 1997-2007. Findings – The argument is that the REI project developers practised management through hope or “hope management”, in contrast to “change management”, creating a project that succeeded in accomplishing its goals of changing the island due to its openness, its rootedness in the island community’s past, and the project developers’ ability to speak to a down-to-earth variety of hope. Originality/value – The paper makes use of an ethnographic study of the present to investigate an unobserved past in which a REI was built. Taking up the “hope debate” in anthropology and Science and Technology Studies (Stengers, 2002; Miyazaki, 2004; Jensen, 2014), the paper contributes with an empirical analysis of the role of hope in the management of change processes.

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Sun, X., G. Adamo, M. Eginligil, H. N. S. Krishnamoorthy, N. I. Zheludev, and C. Soci. "Topological insulator metamaterial with giant circular photogalvanic effect." Science Advances 7, no. 14 (April 2021): eabe5748. http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abe5748.

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One of the most notable manifestations of electronic properties of topological insulators is the dependence of the photocurrent direction on the helicity of circularly polarized optical excitation. The helicity-dependent photocurrents, underpinned by spin-momentum locking of surface Dirac electrons, are weak and easily overshadowed by bulk contributions. Here, we show that the chiral response can be enhanced by nanostructuring. The tight confinement of electromagnetic fields in the resonant nanostructure enhances the photoexcitation of spin-polarized surface states of topological insulator Bi1.5Sb0.5Te1.8Se1.2, leading to an 11-fold increase of the circular photogalvanic effect and a previously unobserved photocurrent dichroism (ρcirc = 0.87) at room temperature. The control of spin transport in topological materials by structural design is a previously unrecognized ability of metamaterials that bridges the gap between nanophotonics and spin electronics, providing opportunities for developing polarization-sensitive photodetectors.

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LEAL, DAVID L., and FREDERICK M. HESS. "Survey Bias on the Front Porch." American Politics Quarterly 27, no. 4 (October 1999): 468–87. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1532673x99027004005.

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We examine whether survey interviewers are biased in their views of certain classes of respondents, thereby introducing unobserved bias into survey results. There has been a great deal of previous research on how racial and gender dynamics affect the responses given by respondents during face-to-face surveys. In this article, we turn this issue around and ask whether human interaction affects how the interviewer views the respondents, and if so, how this may systematically bias surveys. If interviewers are biased, this may impede their ability to conduct interviews in a consistent, nonjudgmental, and unbiased manner. Using three surveys that required the interviewer to evaluate how informed and intelligent the respondents appeared, we found that interviewers were more likely to evaluate respondents of lower socioeconomic status as less informed and less intelligent, even after controlling for objective levels of political information. There is also evidence that Blacks may be negatively evaluated.

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Peskowitz, Zachary. "Ideological Signaling and Incumbency Advantage." British Journal of Political Science 49, no. 2 (May 8, 2017): 467–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0007123416000557.

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This article develops a novel explanation for the incumbency advantage based on incumbents’ ability to signal positions that are ideologically distinct from those of their parties. Using voter-level data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study and controlling for unobserved district heterogeneity, the study finds that voters in US House elections primarily use information about the ideology of candidates’ parties to infer the location of challengers, while they instead rely on information about the individual candidates’ ideologies to place incumbents. In higher-profile Senate elections, the difference between challengers and incumbents is trivial. Decomposing the incumbency advantage into valence and signaling components, the study finds that the signaling mechanism explains 14 per cent of the incumbency advantage in House elections, but only 5 per cent of the advantage in Senate contests. It also finds that a 50 per cent increase in party polarization increases the incumbency advantage by 3 percentage points.

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Ahern, Kenneth R. "Do Proxies for Informed Trading Measure Informed Trading? Evidence from Illegal Insider Trades." Review of Asset Pricing Studies 10, no. 3 (April 25, 2020): 397–440. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/rapstu/raaa004.

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Abstract This paper exploits hand-collected data on illegal insider trades to provide new evidence on the ability of a host of standard measures of illiquidity to detect informed trading. Controlling for unobserved cross-sectional and time-series variation, sampling bias, and strategic timing of insider trades, I find that when information is short-lived, only absolute order imbalance and effective spread are statistically and economically robust predictors of illegal insider trading. However, when information is long-lasting, insiders strategically time their trades to avoid illiquidity, and none of the standard measures considered are reliable predictors, including bid-ask spreads, order imbalance, Kyle’s λ, and Amihud illiquidity. (JEL D53D82G12G14K42) Received: March 14, 2019; Editorial decision: February 18, 2020 by Editor Thierry Foucault. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online.

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Wang, Qiuying, Juan Yin, Aboelmagd Noureldin, and Umar Iqbal. "Research on an Improved Method for Foot-Mounted Inertial/Magnetometer Pedestrian-Positioning Based on the Adaptive Gradient Descent Algorithm." Sensors 18, no. 12 (November 23, 2018): 4105. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s18124105.

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Foot-mounted Inertial Pedestrian-Positioning Systems (FIPPSs) based on Micro Inertial Measurement Units (MIMUs), have recently attracted widespread attention with the rapid development of MIMUs. The can be used in challenging environments such as firefighting and the military, even without augmenting with Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS). Zero Velocity Update (ZUPT) provides a solution for the accumulated positioning errors produced by the low precision and high noise of the MIMU, however, there are some problems using ZUPT for FIPPS, include fast-initial alignment and unobserved heading misalignment angle, which are addressed in this paper. Our first contribution is proposing a fast-initial alignment algorithm for foot-mounted inertial/magnetometer pedestrian positioning based on the Adaptive Gradient Descent Algorithm (AGDA). Considering the characteristics of gravity and Earth’s magnetic field, measured by accelerometers and magnetometers, respectively, when the pedestrian is standing at one place, the AGDA is introduced as the fast-initial alignment. The AGDA is able to estimate the initial attitude and enhance the ability of magnetic disturbance suppression. Our second contribution in this paper is proposing an inertial/magnetometer positioning algorithm based on an adaptive Kalman filter to solve the problem of the unobserved heading misalignment angle. The algorithm utilizes heading misalignment angle as an observation for the Kalman filter and can improve the accuracy of pedestrian position by compensating for magnetic disturbances. In addition, introducing an adaptive parameter in the Kalman filter is able to compensate the varying magnetic disturbance for each ZUPT instant during the walking phase of the pedestrian. The performance of the proposed method is examined by conducting pedestrian test trajectory using MTi-G710 manufacture by XSENS. The experimental results verify the effectiveness and applicability of the proposed method.

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Kunkel, MD, Frank, Elizabeth Fey, MS, Damon Borg, PhD, Richard Stripp, PhD, and Christine Getto, BS. "Assessment of the use of oral fluid as a matrix for drug monitoring in patients undergoing treatment for opioid addiction." Journal of Opioid Management 11, no. 5 (September 1, 2015): 434. http://dx.doi.org/10.5055/jom.2015.0293.

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Drug testing is an important clinical tool that is available to physicians who are assessing the effectiveness of drug treatment as well as patient compliance to the administered program. While urine has traditionally been the matrix of choice for drug monitoring, oral fluid, a filtrate of the blood, has shown great promise as an alternative matrix for such applications. Oral fluid collection can be accomplished without the need for highly trained medical staff through the use of a simple, noninvasive oral fluid collection device, which obtains an adequate sample in only a few minutes. There has been a significant amount of research performed on the use of oral fluid for forensic toxicology application; however, more studies assessing the use of oral fluid drug testing are required to validate its ability to achieve clinical drug monitoring goals. Testing for various drugs in oral fluid may yield a different result when compared to the same drugs in urine, requiring an assessment of the utility of oral fluid for such practices. The purpose of this study was to examine the application of oral fluid drug testing in patients undergoing buprenorphine treatment for opioid dependence. A retrospective analysis of drug testing results obtained from 6,928 patients (4,560 unobserved urine collections and 2,368 observed oral fluid collections) monitored for heroin metabolite, amphetamine, benzodiazepines, buprenorphine, tetrahydrocannabinol, cocaine, codeine, hydrocodone, hydromorphone, methadone, morphine, oxycodone, and oxymorphone was completed. Results of this statistical exercise indicated that patients undergoing observed oral fluid collection tested positive more frequently than those unobserved urine collections for several illicit drugs and prescription medications targeted. Oral fluid was shown to detect illicit drug use as well as noncompliance in this patient population under the studied conditions more often than the urine specimens.

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Drawz, Paul E., and Joachim H. Ix. "BP Measurement in Clinical Practice: Time to SPRINT to Guideline-Recommended Protocols." Journal of the American Society of Nephrology 29, no. 2 (October 19, 2017): 383–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.1681/asn.2017070753.

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Hypertension is the leading chronic disease risk factor in the world and is especially important in patients with CKD, nearly 90% of whom have hypertension. Recently, in the Systolic BP Intervention Trial (SPRINT), intensive lowering of clinic systolic BP to a target <120 mm Hg, compared with a standard BP target of <140 mm Hg, reduced risk for cardiovascular disease and all-cause mortality. However, because BP was measured unobserved using an automated device, some investigators have questioned the ability to translate SPRINT results into routine clinical practice, in which measurement of BP is typically less standardized. In this review, we discuss the BP measurement techniques used in major observational studies and clinical trials that form the evidence base for our current approach to treating hypertension, evaluate the effect of measurement technique on BP readings, and explore how ambulatory BP data from the SPRINT trial may inform this discussion. We conclude by arguing for implementation of guideline-recommended BP measurement techniques in routine clinical practice.

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Schulz, Eric, Charley M. Wu, Azzurra Ruggeri, and Björn Meder. "Searching for Rewards Like a Child Means Less Generalization and More Directed Exploration." Psychological Science 30, no. 11 (October 25, 2019): 1561–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0956797619863663.

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How do children and adults differ in their search for rewards? We considered three different hypotheses that attribute developmental differences to (a) children’s increased random sampling, (b) more directed exploration toward uncertain options, or (c) narrower generalization. Using a search task in which noisy rewards were spatially correlated on a grid, we compared the ability of 55 younger children (ages 7 and 8 years), 55 older children (ages 9–11 years), and 50 adults (ages 19–55 years) to successfully generalize about unobserved outcomes and balance the exploration–exploitation dilemma. Our results show that children explore more eagerly than adults but obtain lower rewards. We built a predictive model of search to disentangle the unique contributions of the three hypotheses of developmental differences and found robust and recoverable parameter estimates indicating that children generalize less and rely on directed exploration more than adults. We did not, however, find reliable differences in terms of random sampling.

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Bonatti, Alessandro, and Gonzalo Cisternas. "Consumer Scores and Price Discrimination." Review of Economic Studies 87, no. 2 (September 12, 2019): 750–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/restud/rdz046.

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Abstract We study the implications of aggregating consumers’ purchase histories into scores that proxy for unobserved willingness to pay. A long-lived consumer interacts with a sequence of firms. Each firm relies on the consumer’s current score–a linear aggregate of noisy purchase signals—to learn about her preferences and to set prices. If the consumer is strategic, she reduces her demand to manipulate her score, which reduces the average equilibrium price. Firms in turn prefer scores that overweigh past signals relative to applying Bayes’ rule with disaggregated data, as this mitigates the ratchet effect and maximizes the firms’ ability to price discriminate. Consumers with high average willingness to pay benefit from data collection, because the gains from low average prices dominate the losses from price discrimination. Finally, hidden scores—those only observed by the firms—reduce demand sensitivity, increase average prices, and reduce consumer surplus, sometimes below the naive-consumer level.

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Journal articles on the topic 'Unobserved ability'

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