Quotation of the day
“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” Carl Sagan, Cosmos (1980) .
Month: March 2007
Your Congress Your Health
Ever wonder what exactly are your Congressional representatives’ views on health care? A new website from Research!America and Parade look into just this question. Currently, their ‘Your Congress. Your Health.‘ website is asking members of the public to vote on which health issues/questions they want to be asked of their representatives. According to the website,…
On the Optimal Progressivity of the Income Tax Code
Economists throughout recent history have created models in search of answering the following question: what is the optimal income tax structure? Optimal is generally defined by some social welfare function. While liberals generally favor progressive taxes over proportional or regressive taxes for ideological reasons, this paper makes an argument for progressive taxes by employing economic…
A week of Corruption
As an economist with libertarian leanings, last week was a great one to display the imperfection of government action. Below are some of the lowlights: Scooter Libby was convicted for leaking the identity of a CIA agent (Washington Post article). A Justice Department audit found that “the FBI broke the law to secretly pry out…
Bayesian Inference III
Today we will look at some common distributions used for Bayesian inference. Beta The first distribution we will look at is the Beta distribution. The beta distribution is equal to: [B(a,b)]-1πa-1(1-π)b-1. We can show that: If the prior ~ πa(1-π)b And likelihood ~ πS(1-π)F Then the posterior ~ πa+S(1-π)b+F Where ‘~’ denotes equal except for…
Elle Jae Jewelry
Do you need a gift for that special someone? Are you interested in being one of the first to own a rare, handcrafted necklace? If so, Lisa Jacobson (my girlfriend) has some amazing pieces you should check out. On her Elle Jae website (click here), you can view and purchase her latest cutting-edge designs. Take…
Bayesian Inference II
Now we will give an example of Bayesian inference in a more complicating setting. This example is based on a problem from pp. 588-591 of Introductory Statistics for Business and Economics by Wonnacott and Wonnacott. Let us assume that there is a consumer electronics company named Banana, inc.. Banana sells iPood mp3 players. Banana, inc.,…
Health Wonk Review
This week’s edition of the Health Wonk Review is up at Joe Paduda’s always informative Managed Care Matters website.
Voucher Debate
There was an interesting post on the Economist’s Free Exchange blog regarding the Health Insurance voucher debate (A veto for…). The post contains a critique of a healthcare voucher plan put forth by Ezekiel Emmanuel and Victor Fuchs in The New Republic. The pros and cons of the plan are certainly interesting but the blog’s…
Bayesian Inference I
Bayesian Inference is an important econometric tool. Over the next few days, we will review some of the basic Bayesian inference methods. Economicitis occurs in 300 out of every 100,000 adults. Recently, however, a test has been developed to screen for the disease. Of 1000 individuals with economicitis who were tested, only 40 had an…