Previous empirical research has shown that Mexico's Oportunidades program has succeeded in increasing schooling and improving health of disadvantaged children. This paper studies the program's potential longer-term consequences for the poverty and inequality of these children. It adapts methods developed in DiNardo, Fortin and Lemieux (1996) and incorporates existing experimental estimates of t...

Article history: Received 25 August 2015 Received in revised form 17 November 2015 Accepted 17 November 2015 Available online 18 November 2015 Law is a powerful tool for combatting public health issues. This article reviews existing empirical research on the effect of eight legal levers on outcomes related to child maltreatment. Laws created with the intent to address child maltreatment are oft...

In this paper we develop dual free SDCA with adaptive probabilities for regularized empirical risk minimization. This extends recent work of Shai Shalev-Shwartz [SDCA without Duality, arXiv:1502.06177] to allow non-uniform selection of ”dual” coordinate in SDCA. Moreover, the probability can change over time, making it more efficient than uniform selection. Our work focuses on generating adapti...

This paper aims to provide direct and indirect evidence on setting up rules for applications of the empirical Bayes shrinkage (EBS), and offers cautionary remarks concerning its applicability. In epidemiology, there is still a lack of relevant criteria in the application of EBS. The bias of the shrinkage estimator is investigated in terms of the sums of errors, squared errors and absolute error...

We consider the problem of estimating the correlation in bivariate normal data when the means and variances are assumed known, with emphasis on the small sample case. We consider eight different estimators, several of them considered here for the first time in the literature. In a simulation study, we found that Bayesian estimators using the uniform and arc-sine priors outperformed several empi...

We report evidence of a deep interplay between cross-correlations hierarchical properties and multifractality of New York Stock Exchange daily stock returns. The degree of multifractality displayed by different stocks is found to be positively correlated to their depth in the hierarchy of cross-correlations. We propose a dynamical model that reproduces this observation along with an array of ot...

each semester, students are asked to evaluate the academic staff through an online questionnaire. generalized estimating equations model (gee), taking into account the correlation between scores, is the established tool to analyze longitudinal data. the aim of this manuscript is to identify characteristics that influence staff score and to address the importance of selection of appropriate corr...

Drawing on empirical research completed in Belgium, this article presents a comparative analysis of the care regimes for two categories of children: transnational adoptees and unaccompanied minors. Although state immigration policies consider the two groups of minors as humanitarian exceptions that require preferential treatment, the kind of humanitarian help and social investment they are beli...