I’ve always thought that it was ironic that most countries with the word “Democratic” in their name are exceptionally un-democratic in reality. So I was very interested in the following post on Reddit this week showing exactly this (https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/7nkyek/countries_with_the_word_democratic_in_their/). However, there are only 8 countries that have “democratic” in their name: People’s Democratic Republic of […]
Back in January 2013 I wrote a blog post showing how to implement a basic cluster/block bootstrap in R. One drawback of the cluster bootstap is the length of time it takes to sample with replacement and create the data samples. Thankfully some of the comments on my previous post illustrated simple ways to get […]
I don’t understand why any researcher would choose not to use panel/multilevel methods on panel/hierarchical data. Let’s take the following linear regression as an example: , where is a random effect for the i-th group. A pooled OLS regression model for the above is unbiased and consistent. However, it will be inefficient, unless for all […]
The reason why football is so exciting is uncertainty. The outcome of any match or league is unknown, and you get to watch the action unfold without knowing what’s going to happen. Watching matches where you know the score is never exciting. This weekend the English Premier League season will conclude with little fanfare. Bar […]
Interesting election results in the UK over the weekend, where the Conservatives romped to victory. This was despite a widespread consensus that neither the Conservative or Labour party would get a majority. This was a triumph for uncertainty and random error over the deterministic, as none of the statistical forecasts appeared to deem such a […]
If history can tell us anything about the World Cup, it’s that the host nation has an advantage of all other teams. Evidence of this was presented last night as the referee in the Brazil-Croatia match unjustly ruled in Brazil’s favour on several occasions. But what it is the statistical evidence of a host advantage? […]
In April 2012, I wrote this blog post demonstrating an approach proposed in Lewbel (2012) that identifies endogenous regressor coefficients in a linear triangular system. Now I am happy to announce the release of the ivlewbel package, which contains a function through which Lewbel’s method can be applied in R. This package is now available […]
In April 2012, I wrote this blog post demonstrating an approach proposed in Lewbel (2012) that identifies endogenous regressor coefficients in a linear triangular system. Now I am happy to announce the release of the ivlewbel package, which contains a function through which Lewbel’s method can be applied in R. This package is now available […]
In econometrics, generalized method of moments (GMM) is one estimation methodology that can be used to calculate instrumental variable (IV) estimates. Performing this calculation in R, for a linear IV model, is trivial. One simply uses the gmm() function in the excellent gmm package like an lm() or ivreg() function. The gmm() function will estimate […]
In econometrics, generalized method of moments (GMM) is one estimation methodology that can be used to calculate instrumental variable (IV) estimates. Performing this calculation in R, for a linear IV model, is trivial. One simply uses the gmm() function in the excellent gmm package like an lm() or ivreg() function. The gmm() function will estimate […]
