MIT Dept. of Economics Working Papers Series: Recent submissions

Now showing items 157-159 of 1293

    • Why Do Voters Dismantle Checks and Balances? 

      Acemoglu, Daron; Robinson, James A.; Torvik, Ragnar (Cambridge, MA: Department of Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2011-07-17)
      Voters often dismantle constitutional checks and balances on the executive. If such checks and balances limit presidential abuses of power and rents, why do voters support their removal? We argue that by reducing politician ...

    • Sparse Models and Methods for Optimal Instruments with an Application to Eminent Domain 

      Belloni, Alexandre; Chen, Daniel; Chernozhukov, Victor; Hansen, Christian (Cambridge, MA: Department of Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2011-07-12)
      We develop results for the use of LASSO and Post-LASSO methods to form first-stage predictions and estimate optimal instruments in linear instrumental variables (IV) models with many instruments, p, that apply even when p ...

    • Inference for Extremal Conditional Quantile Models, with an Application to Market and Birthweight Risks 

      Chernozhukov, Victor; Fernandez-Val, Ivan (Cambridge, MA: Department of Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2011-07-12)
      Quantile regression is an increasingly important empirical tool in economics and other sciences for analyzing the impact of a set of regressors on the conditional distribution of an outcome. Extremal quantile regression, ...