Julia A Gamas Buentello
>
> Does anybody have a subroutine that will solve the
> following problem?:
>
> I have a gravity model of the form:
>
> Tij = Ai *Oi* Bj* Dj * (d to the minus beta), where
>
> Ai = Sumation over i of [Bj* Dj * (d to the minus beta)]
>
> and
>
> Bj = Summation over j of [Ai Oi * (d to the minus beta)]
>
> The purpose is to find beta using non-linear maximum
> likelihood. The Ai
> and Bj are balancing factors that "guarantee" that two
> constraints are met.
> I want to estimate it using maximum likelihood. The
> procedure is to start
> with a beta=1, then use it to iterate Ai and Bj until Ai
> and Bj no longer
> change, then to go back and check that a constraint
> equation is met. The
> constraint equation is:
>
> estimated sum over i and j of Tij ln(dij) = the "real" sum
> over i and j of
> Tij ln(dij)
>
> Does Stata have a subroutine that already does this? I am
> hoping to save
> some graduate student hours and not have to write up the
> program from
> scratch.
I guess the short answer is No.
For those curious about what all this means,
the idea is that fluxes T_ij (say of people
or of goods or of information) between places
i and j in some region are deemed to be driven by characteristics
of origins O_i, of destinations D_j, and
of the distances d_ij between them. The
distance function here is one particular choice.
The term "gravity model" here is a historical
misnomer based on the fact that some models before
this one, which emerged in the late 1960s,
used a closer analogue of Newtonian gravitation
in which interaction between places was held
to be similar to attraction between masses and
so governed by an inverse-square law. Of course,
as every traveller knows, distance between
places, however defined, is not the only measure
of the difficulty of interaction.
This is all equivalent to an entropy-minimising
approach based on statistical mechanics. There is
Fortran code in R.S. Baxter's 1976 book which implements
that, and I imagine that it would be less work
to translate that into Stata than to try
to set this up in Stata as a ML problem, unless
you particularly want the side results of that as
well as the parameter estimates. Or, of
course, Fortran compilers continue to exist.
Nick
[email protected]
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