In this paper we revisit various important issues relating to practical estimation of the multinomial probit model, using an empirical analysis of car ownership as a test case. To provide context, a brief literature review of empirical probit studies is included. Estimates are obtained for a full range of model specifications, including models with random (uncorrelated and correlated) taste var...

We consider the problem of gene selection and classification based on the expression data. Specifically, we propose a bootstrap Bayesian gene selection method for nonlinear probit regression. A binomial probit regression model with data augmentation is used to transform the binomial problem into a sequence of smoothing problems. The probit regressor is approximated as a nonlinear combination of...

The mixture-Gaussian model-based clustering method has received much attention in clustering gene expression profiles in the literature of bioinformatics. However, this method suffers from two difficulties in applications. The first one is on the parameter estimation, which becomes difficult when the dimension of the data is high or the size of a cluster is small. The second one is on the norma...

Logistic and probit regression models are commonly used in practice to analyze binary response data, but the maximum likelihood estimators of these models are not robust to outliers. This paper considers a robit regression model, which replaces the normal distribution in the probit regression model with a t-distribution with a known or unknown number of degrees of freedom. It is shown that (i) ...

The issue of shared use urban freight facilities first received attention during the 1970's when it was observed that, while inter-urban freight movements were becoming increasingly efficient, there were significant diseconomies in the movement of freight via truck within urban areas. Early research suggested that shared urban freight facilities should be constructed so that trucking companies ...

This thesis explores the relationship between voter income and political ideology preference at the regional and state level. Traditional theories of voter preference contend that richer Americans tend to favor more conservative policy agendas in an effort to minimize income redistribution. The existing empirical literature supports this claim at the national level by finding a significant posi...

Few studies have examined whether financial aid affects college retention. This paper models the decision to enroll and re-enroll in college, which yields a bivariate probit model that is estimated using detailed individual data from a large public university. The analysis uses the unique detail of institution-specific data to examine the effect of financial aid on the re-enrollment decision, a...

Many economic decisions are made jointly within households. This raises the question about spouses’ relative influence on joint decisions and the determinants of relative influence. Using a controlled experiment (on inter-temporal choice), we let each spouse first make individual decisions and then make joint decisions with the other spouse. We use a random parameter probit model to measure the...

In this paper, the effects of socioeconomic characteristics (gender, age, education level, marital status, income, occupational and health status, household size and social relationships) on individuals ́ health status in Spain from 1994 to 2001 are analysed. The estimations are carried out using ordered probit models and new data from the whole waves of the European Community Household Panel (E...