The use of robust regression estimators has gained popularity among applied econometricians. The main argument invoked to justify the use of the robust estimators is that they provide efficiency gains in the presence of outliers or non-normal errors. Unfortunately, most practitioners seem to be...

We extend the simulation results given in Santos Silva and Tenreyro (2006, The log of gravity,ʺ The Review of Economics and Statistics, 88, 641-658) by considering data generated as a finite mixture of gamma variates. Data generated in this way can naturally have a large proportion of zeros and...

We note that the existence of the maximum likelihood estimates for Poisson regression depends on the data configuration. Because standard software does not check for this problem, the practitioner may be surprised to find that in some applications estimation of the Poisson regression is...

We extend the simulation results given in Santos-Silva and Tenreyro (2006, "The Log of Gravity", The Review of Economics and Statistics, 88, pp.641-658) by considering data generated as a finite mixture of gamma variates. Data generated in this way can naturally have a large proportion of zeros...

Helpman, Melitz, and Rubinstein (2008)HMRpresent a rich theoretical model to study the determinants of bilateral trade flows across countries. The model is then empirically implemented through a two-stage estimation procedure. This note seeks to clarify some econometric aspects of the estimation...

We propose a semi-parametric mode regression estimator for the case in which the variate of interest is continuous and observable over its entire un- bounded support. The estimator is semi-parametric in that the conditional mode is specified as a parametric function, but only mild assumptions...