Item response theory is one of the modern test theories with applications in educational and psychological testing. Recent developments made it possible to characterize some desired properties in terms of a collection of manifest ones, so that hypothesis tests on these traits can, in principle,...

In this paper, I examine the properties of the class of generalized empirical likelihood estimators of moment-condition models. These nonparametric likelihood estimators satisfy exactly the moment conditions and automatically remove any bias due to a lack of centering. Moreover, the bias of the...

We propose new approaches to test for spanning in the return and stochastic discount factor mean-variance frontiers, which assess if either the centred or uncentred mean and cost representing portfolios are shared by the initial and extended sets of assets. We show that our proposed tests are...

We propose a novel statistic to test the rank of a matrix. The rank statistic overcomes deficiencies of existing rank statistics, like: a Kronecker covariance matrix for the canonical correlation rank statistic of Anderson [Annals of Mathematical Statistics (1951), 22, 327–351] sensitivity to...

Important choices for efficient and accurate evaluation of marginal likelihoods by means of Monte Carlo simulation methods are studied for the case of highly non-elliptical posterior distributions. We focus on the situation where one makes use of importance sampling or the independence chain...

This paper considers two models to deal with an outcome variable that contains a large fraction of zeros, such as individual expenditures on health care: a sample-selection model and a two-part model. The sample-selection model uses two possibly correlated processes to determine the outcome: a...

This paper shows how a high level matrix programming language may be used to perform Monte Carlo simulation, bootstrapping, estimation by maximum likelihood and GMM, and kernel regression in parallel on symmetric multiprocessor computers or clusters of workstations. The implementation of...

The performance of Monte Carlo integration methods like importance-sampling or Markov-Chain Monte-Carlo procedures depends greatly on the choice of the importance- or candidate-density. Such a density must typically be "close" to the target density to yield numerically accurate results with...

In this paper we replace the Gaussian errors in the standard Gaussian, linear state space model with stochastic volatility processes. This is called a GSSF-SV model. We show that conventional MCMC algorithms for this type of model are ineffective, but that this problem can be removed by...