They say money can't buy happiness — but can good looks do the job?
Although this is interesting, it's sure to annoy econometricians.
They say money can't buy happiness — but can good looks do the job?
Although this is interesting, it's sure to annoy econometricians.
I thought I should store this so I can make fun of IDC four years from now.
If your lifetime plan includes writing an article or a book, you may need to learn how write a rather large document in LaTeX. Or maybe you are co-writing a document (Andrew and I did a big homework once and synchronizing files can be tricky).
One important thing is to use a file synchronizer like Windows Live Sync or Dropbox, but the other is to teach LaTeX to use multiple files.
The subfiles package can help with that. The documentation for subfiles is here.
It allows you to write a master file and several subfiles that can be compiled independently, so you can work on and compile each subfile (for example, a chapter or a section) and see the results, and compile the master file to see the full book. A simple and useful example can be found in Wikibooks.
The relations between First Quantum and the Democratic Republic of Congo have gone from bad to worse in recent months, after the country expropriated the miner’s $765 million Kolwezi copper tailings project in September. Blog
via af.reuters.com
I was going to be his TA this quarter. Well, if he wants me, I'll still be!
The good news in Japan was that the winds had been pushing the radiated plumes from the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant out into the Pacific Ocean, away from populated areas. The winds would likely prevent more harm from happening to the earthquake-and-tsunami-battered region.
via www.time.com
The law of demand in action: a bottle of iodide pill went from $6 to $140 in the West Coast.
I wrote a tutorial on how to implement some portfolio optimizers in R for a class. The tutorial implements three types of factor models:
This is for instructional purposes only: it's not a software for you to plug in your portfolio and start investing. However, if you make millions doing so, I wouldn't mind a 10% cut.
Two things that are not in the tutorial but that are important if you really want to implement something for real use are:
I recently had to prepare a paper about the impacts of the Dodd-Frank legislation for a class. Rather randomly, I chose the Durbin Amendment, a provision that increases regulation on the debit card market. What I learned about the debit and credit card market was fascinating.
The amendment passed into law in July 2010 and the Fed is now discussing how it will be regulated, and this is where the relevant points appear. For example, the amendment requires a price cap on the fees that merchants have to pay, but it doesn't say how much. The average fee in 2010 was about 44 cents, and the Fed set the cap at 12 cents, cutting heavily into the profits of (I can safely say) your bank. As a consequence, you may pay more for checking, but is this really bad?
It is very possible that many of my Managerial Economics students will scour the web for class notes (instead of using the course website). And maybe, just maybe, after spending some time on Wikipedia's article on Managerial Economics and in some random essay mills, they may find the lecture notes here.
It's very possible that looking at the course website would have been faster, but the course website is not integrated with Facebook and not accessible through Google, so I'm just making it easy on them.
Download Managerial Economics Lecture Notes
I explore copulas by creating a model with four funds that track market indexes
for stocks, bonds, dollar and commodities. I then use the model to generate simulated values
and test the performance of a model portfolio using the real returns and the simulated returns
to calculate the value at risk (VaR) and the expected shortfall (ES).