Specification and Estimation of Econometric Duration Models

该项目为经济学家和其他对研究个人行为和结果感兴趣的社会科学家开发新的统计工具。这些工具将被用来回答与夫妻共同退休决定有关的经验问题和卫生经济学领域的问题。研究集中在三个一般方法论主题上。在每一个领域内开发的工具将适用于经济学和社会科学的一些领域。第一个主题涉及研究者对某个事件的持续时间感兴趣的情况。在这一部分的项目中开发的工具将在经济学的许多不同领域中有用：在劳动经济学中，研究失业的持续时间;在公共经济学中，研究福利计划的参与;在市场营销中，研究广告的长期影响;在健康经济学中，研究健康状况的演变。相对于现有方法的创新之处在于，该项目将明确关注两个人共同选择持续时间的情况。例如，丈夫和妻子可以根据自己和配偶的意愿共同决定退休时间。这种联合决策将导致两个持续期之间的相互作用，这种相互作用与如果持续期是由两个竞争公司选择的相互作用有着根本的不同。这两种类型的相互作用意味着，影响一个人的政策的影响？的行为，将扩大或减少的事实，该人？一个人的行为会反过来影响其他人。因此，重要的是要有衡量这些相互作用的重要性的工具。本研究中涉及的第二种一般情况涉及两种结果随着时间的推移相互作用的情况。例如，健康和社会经济地位无论是在当时还是在一段时间内都是相互关联的，这一点已得到公认。然而，在解释这种相关性时，重要的是要确定这种相关性是否存在，因为两者之一的变化会导致另一个在未来发生变化（如果是这样，那么是哪个导致哪个），还是因为它们都是由相同的潜在驱动力决定的。该项目将继续制定可用于回答这些问题的方法。第三个主题规模较小，重点更突出。它解决了统计问题的情况下，研究人员感兴趣的持续时间，但只有数据的持续时间，如果他们落在某个区间。事实证明，这与研究死亡率（以及它与各种经济因素的关系）有关，因为某些数据集只包含死亡日期，如果它发生在数据收集期间。然而，这里的方法论贡献将有更普遍的应用。更广泛的影响：最直接的广泛影响来自于新的统计工具软件将在网上提供，以及对参与该项目的学生进行培训。该项目还将改善经济学家和其他社会科学家思考其实证研究结果的方式。

This project develops new statistical tools for economists and other social scientists interested in studying individual behavior and outcomes over time. These tools will be used to answer empirical questions related to the joint retirement decisions of husbands and wives and to questions in the area of health economics.The research is centered on three general methodological themes. The tools that are developed within each of these will be applicable in a number of areas in economics and the social sciences. The first theme involves situations in which a researcher is interested in the duration of some event. The tools developed in this part of the project will be useful in many different areas of economics: in labor economics, to study the duration of unemployment; in public economics, to study participation in welfare programs; in marketing, to study the long-run effects of advertising; and in health economics, to study the evolution in health status. The innovation relative to existing methods, is that this project will explicitly focus on situations in which two individuals choose their durations jointly. For example, a husband and a wife may jointly decide on their retirement times taking their own as well as their spouses preferences into account. This joint decision will lead to an interaction between the two durations that is fundamentally different from the interaction that one would see if the durations were chosen by, say, two competing firms. Both types of interactions imply that the impact of a policy that affects one person?s behavior, will be enlarged or diminished by the fact that the person?s behavior will in turn influence others. It is therefore important to have tools for measuring the importance of these interactions. The second general scenario addressed in this research involves situations in which two outcomes interact with each other over time. For example, it is well-established that health and socioeconomic status are related, both contemporaneously and over time. In interpreting such correlations, however, it is important to determine whether the correlation exists because a change in one of the two causes the other to change in the future (and, if so, which causes which), or because they are both determined by the same underlying driving forces. The project will continue the development of methods that can be used to answer such questions.The third theme is smaller and more focused. It addresses statistical problems in situations in which a researcher is interested in durations, but only has data on the durations if they fall in some interval. It turns out that this is relevant for studying mortality (and how it related to various economic factors) because certain data sets only contain the dates of death if it occurs over the period in which that data was collected. However, the methodological contributions made here will have applications that are much more general. Broader impacts: The most direct broader impact comes from the fact that software for the new statistical tools will be made available online, and from the training of the students involved in the project. The project will also improve the way economists and other social scientists think about their empirical findings.