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Now showing items 11-16 of 16
Essays on Econometrics and Decision Theory
(2013-09-24)
This dissertation presents three essays. The first essay, coauthored with Tomasz Strzalecki, is a classical exercise in axiomatic decision theory. We propose a simple and novel axiomatization of quasi-hyperbolic discounting, ...
Methods in Hypothesis Testing, Markov Chain Monte Carlo and Neuroimaging Data Analysis
(2013-09-25)
This thesis presents three distinct topics: a modified K-S test for autocorrelated data, improving MCMC convergence rate with residual augmentations, and resting state fMRI data analysis. In Chapter 1, we present a modified ...
Three Essays on Race and Politics
(2013-08-12)
Understanding how race shapes the lives of individuals and transforms institutions is central to social science. Yet, for many scholars, race is widely understood as a fixed and monolithic category that is resistant to ...
Quasi-Experimental Health Policy Research: Evaluation of Universal Health Insurance and Methods for Comparative Effectiveness Research
(2013-10-08)
This dissertation consists of two empirical papers and one methods paper. The first two papers use quasi-experimental methods to evaluate the impact of universal health insurance reform in Massachusetts (MA) and Thailand ...
Advances in Empirical Bayes Modeling and Bayesian Computation
(2013-08-14)
Chapter 1 of this thesis focuses on accelerating perfect sampling algorithms for a Bayesian hierarchical model. A discrete data augmentation scheme together with two different parameterizations yields two Gibbs samplers ...
Statistical Computation for Problems in Dynamic Systems and Protein Folding
(2013-08-21)
Inference for dynamic systems and conformational sampling for protein folding are two problems motivated by applied data, which pose computational challenges from a statistical perspective. Dynamic systems are often ...