Latent-variable models are central to economics but often entail intractable integration. Variational inference (VI), widely used in machine learning, turns this integration into tractable, differentiable optimization by replacing the likelihood with a variational objective. However, guarantees of recovering the true...

Policies restricting gun sales face substantial political opposition and constitutional constraints. In this paper, we ask how costly it would be to induce potential handgun buyers to choose less lethal alternatives. Pairing stated-choice experiments with a behavioral model of firearm...

We study differences in economic outcomes by perceived skin tone among African Americans using full-count U.S. decennial census data from the late-19th and early-20th centuries. Comparing children coded as “Black” or “Mulatto” by census enumerators and linking these children across...

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