Estimating Legislators' Preferred Points

Methods for Estimating Principal Points

Estimating with Enhanced Object Points vs. Function Points

In the research community Function Points is considered as a de facto standard. Even according to Gartner Group "function points will provide the primary means for measuring application size, reaching a penetration of approximately 50% of development organisations by the year 2000" (Hotle, 1996). We do not know what sources this conjecture is based upon. However, we observe that in many major c...

Legislators' Patterns of Cooperation

This study attempts to identify the patterns of cooperation between legislators. We argue that if legislators decide to cooperate, they prefer to do so first with their colleagues who share similar affiliations and then across affiliations. In order to examine this hypothesis, we devised a unique cooperation scale and tested it using a sample of the private member bills that were initiated in t...

Patients, doctors, and legislators.

A I prepared to examine a new patient, “B,” I commented on her lovely necklace. B told me that her mother had given it to her more than 20 years ago, when she was diagnosed with a serious medical condition. “Oh?” I asked. My curiosity was piqued—B hadn’t reported any important family history. Her mother, it turned out, had Huntington’s disease. The necklace was a gift, given before her mother d...

Estimating turning points using large data sets

Dating business cycles entails ascertaining economy-wide turning points. Broadly speaking, there are two approaches in the literature. The first approach, which dates to Burns and Mitchell (1946), is to identify turning points individually in a large number of series, then to look for a common date that could be called an aggregate turning point. The second approach, which has been the focus of...