The Group Theater essays

The Group Theater essays The Group Theatre began as a small company that provided actors and actresses with a means and a location to practice plays. Three people, Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg, and Cheryl Crawford formed The Group Theatre. The Group Theatre escalated in 1931 and ended abruptly in 1941 prevailing through the years there were hits, periods of flops, financial straits, depressing inactivity, and spiraling to as glittering of a success as any on Broadway. This story however is also the story of growth and development throughout American cultural life in the thirties. The year is 1928, and the tedious beginning of The Group Theatre began when Harold Clurman answered the call of a real estate man, Sidney Ross, who was thinking of going into theatrical production and was seeking an aide of some kind. Clurman then contacted his friend, Strasberg, and the two of them outlined their ideas. The proposal was quite simple, they wanted to work on a play that had no formal production plans, but the work would be instructive to the actors, and a new theatre might be born of their modest efforts. After many weeks of rehearsals their play was viewed by an exclusive audience, and Waldo Frank, who had written the play advised Ross that the play should be run, the members reviewed the idea and came up with their own proposal-they would rehearse another play, and if the outcome was the same response they would head to New York. After six weeks they performed the play to about 100 people, and got the same response, however nothing happened, and the experiment was finished. Cheryl Crawford urged Clurman to prepare for future by finding actors for their more permanent company. Some actors that were considered were Franchot Tone, Morris Carnovsky, Meisner, and others. Since The Group Theatre had no money, no plays, the meetings of the actors were to be entirely unofficial. The new idea of The Group Theatre was to establish a theatre in wh...

Meaning of Instrumental Variables (IV) in Econometrics

Meaning of Instrumental Variables (IV) in Econometrics In the fields of statistics and econometrics, the term instrumental variables  can refer to either of two definitions. Instrumental variables can refer to: An estimation technique (often abbreviated as IV)The exogenous variables used in the IV estimation technique As a method of estimation, instrumental variables (IV) are used in many economic applications often when a controlled experiment to test the existence of a causal relationship is not feasible and  some correlation between the original explanatory variables and the error term is suspected. When the explanatory variables correlate or show some form of dependence with the error terms in a regression relationship, instrumental variables can provide a consistent estimation. The theory of instrumental variables was first introduced by Philip G. Wright in his 1928 publication titled  The Tariff on Animal and Vegetable Oils but has since evolved in its applications in economics. When Instrumental Variables Are Used There are several circumstances under which explanatory variables show a correlation with the error terms and an instrumental variable may be used. First, the dependent variables may actually cause one of the explanatory variables (also known as the covariates). Or, relevant explanatory variables are simply omitted or overlooked in the model. It may even be that the explanatory variables suffered some error of measurement. The problem with any of these situations is that the traditional linear regression that might normally be employed in the analysis may produce inconsistent or biased estimates, which is where instrumental variables (IV) would then be used and the second definition of instrumental variables becomes more important. In addition to being the name of the method, instrumental variables are also the very variables used to obtain consistent  estimates using this method. They are exogenous, meaning that they exist outside of the explanatory equation, but as instrumental variables, they are correlated with the equations endogenous variables. Beyond this definition, there is one other primary requirement for using an instrumental variable in a linear model: the instrumental variable must not be correlated with the error term of the explanatory equation. That is to say that the instrumental variable cannot pose the same issue as the original variable for which it is attempting to resolve. Instrumental Variables in Econometrics Terms For a deeper understanding of instrumental variables, lets review an example.  Suppose one has a model: y Xb e Here y is a T x 1 vector of dependent variables, X is a T x k matrix of independent variables, b is a k x 1 vector of parameters to estimate, and e is a k x 1 vector of errors. OLS can be imagined, but suppose in the environment being modeled that the matrix of independent variables X may be correlated to the es. Then using a T x k matrix of independent variables Z, correlated to the Xs but uncorrelated to the es one can construct an IV estimator that will be consistent: bIV (ZX)-1Zy The two-stage least squares estimator is an important extension of this idea. In that discussion above, the exogenous variables Z are called instrumental variables and the instruments (ZZ)-1(ZX) are estimates of the part of X that is not correlated to the es.