Alexis Akira Toda

Alexis Akira Toda

Mathematical economist

Paper accepted

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Published:

My paper “Asymptotic Linearity of Consumption Functions and Computational Efficiency” with Qingyin Ma got accepted at Journal of Mathematical Economics. The main result is that when the marginal utility function is regularly varying (behave like a power function), the consumption function in optimal savings problem becomes asymptotically linear and we characterize the asymptotic slopes. Initially this paper was part of a bigger project with Ma & Toda (2021), but we split the paper in two to keep them focused and at manageable lengths. The JET paper treats only the case with CRRA (constant relative risk aversion) utility but has an economic application. The JME paper assumes regular variation plus some technical condition and discusses computational efficiency.

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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

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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.