On May 25, 2020, George Floyd, an African American man, was killed by a White police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His murder came shortly after the homicide of two other African Americans: Ahmaud Arbery, on February 23, 2020, and Breonna Taylor, on March 13, 2020. These horrible crimes sparked a movement and a wave of protest, ...

This blog post introduces the RATest package we released a while back on CRAN with my colleague and good friend Mauricio Olivares-Gonzalez. The package contains a collection of randomization tests, data sets and examples. The current version focuses on two testing problems and their implementation in empirical work, mostly related ...

The Spatial Equilibrium concept is well known to urban economists. In a nutshell, it states that in equilibrium there are no rents to be gained by changing locations. Ed Glaeser begins Chapter 2 of his book: “Cities, Agglomeration, and Spatial Equilibrium” with the well known Alonso-Muth-Mills model. In this post, I ...

This spring break I was reading a couple of papers about segregation in the US (Cutler and Galeser 1997 and Cutler et al 1999). A paragraph on Cutler et al (1999) caught my attention: “Chicago was the most segregated city in 1890, the fourth most segregated city in 1940, the most segregated MSA in 1970, and ...

This tutorial was prepared for the Ninth Annual Midwest Graduate Student Summit on Applied Economics, Regional, and Urban Studies (AERUS) on April 23rd-24th, 2016 at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.

Many of the problems we encounter in Econometrics can be formulated as a linear or a quadratic problem. In this post, I want to approach two traditional problems: Quantile Regression and Ordinary Least Squares as convex problems and how to implement them in R using the package RMosek.

Many of the problems we encounter in Econometrics can be formulated as a linear or a quadratic problem. In this post, I want to approach two traditional problems: Quantile Regression and Ordinary Least Squares as convex problems and how to implement them in R using the package RMosek.