Alexis Akira Toda

Alexis Akira Toda

Mathematical economist

Difference between $$..., \[..., and \begin{equation*}...

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I have been using \(\LaTeX\) for over 20 years now. When I write a displayed equation without numbering on a single line, I have been using $$...$$ because it was simple. I didn’t understand why some people use \[...\], because the latter takes more time to type and is not necessarily easy to read. Today I read this article and learned that $$...$$ is incorrect. From now on, I will switch to \begin{equation*}...\end{equation*} because it is easy to read and we can add equation numbering by deleting * if we change our mind.

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Syllabus template

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As I am preparing for my first teaching assignments at Emory, I started from creating a syllabus template. My department provided a Word template, which was not exactly to my taste, so I wrote a template in \(\LaTeX\) here. The version titled syllabus_template.tex follows the basic structure of the Emory economics template, and the version titled syllabus_template_toda.tex adds some of my information that I use across all my courses. A few comments:

Income inequality at UCSD economics, 2023

less than 1 minute read

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The compensation at University of California has just published the figures for 2023. I have updated the data set for my paper and run regressions. In case readers are interested in predicting their salaries, the prediction equation in 2023 is \[\log y = 12.12 -0.0100T + 0.0052N_\textrm{pub} + 0.0204N_\textrm{top5} + 0.2485D_\textrm{assoc} + 0.5048D_\text{full}, \] where \(y\) is the 9-month salary, \(T\) is the number of years elapsed since obtaining Ph.D., \(N_\textrm{pub}\) is the cumulative number of peer-reviewed research articles, \(N_\textrm{top5}\) is the cumulative number of top 5 publications, and \(D_\textrm{assoc}, D_\textrm{full}\) are dummy variables for associate and full professors.

Comparing taxable, traditional, and Roth accounts

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Three years ago, I wrote a blog post in which I mentioned that I stopped (strictly speaking, significantly reduced) contributing in 403(b) and 457(b) retirement savings plans because I could no longer afford it.