This article draws out some implications of son targeting fertility behavior and studies its determinants. We demonstrate that such behavior has two notable implications at the aggregate level: (a) girls have a larger number of siblings (sibling effect), and (b) girls are born at relatively earlier parities within families (birth-order effect). Empirically testing for these effects, we find tha...

This paper proposes a method to estimate relative ministerial weights in parliamentary democracies. Specifically, our method combines a bargaining model of government formation with maximum likelihood estimation. The data required for estimation are who formateurs are, what each party’s voting weight is, and what ministerial seats each party obtains. We use variation of the data and the structu...

This paper continues our earlier investigations into the inversion of random functions in a general (abstract) setting. In Section 2, we investigate a concept of invertibility and the invertibility of the composition of random functions defined on finite sets. In Section 3, we resolve some questions concerning the number of samples required to ensure the accuracy of maximum likelihood estimatio...

Maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) methods are widely used for evolutionary tree. As evolutionary tree is not a smooth parameter, the consistency of its MLE has been a topic of debate. It has been noted without proof that the classical proof of consistency by Wald holds for the MLE of evolutionary tree. Other proofs of consistency under various models were also proposed. Here we will discuss s...

A batch blind equalization scheme is developed based on maximum likelihood joint channel and data estimation. In this scheme, the joint maximum likelihood optimization is decomposed into a twolevel optimization loop. A micro genetic algorithm is employed at the upper level to identify the unknown channel model, and the Viterbi algorithm is used at the lower level to provide the maximum likeliho...

In non-cooperative scenarios, the estimation of direct sequence spread spectrum (DS-SS) signals has to be done in a blind manner. In this letter, we consider the spreading sequence estimation problem for DS-SS signals. First, the maximum likelihood estimate (MLE) of spreading sequence is derived, then a semidefinite relaxation (SDR) approach is proposed to cope with the exponential complexity o...