The standard confidence regions based on the first-order approximation of quantile regression estimators can be inaccurate in small samples. We show that confidence regions based on the smoothed empirical likelihood ratio have coverage errors of order n^{-1} and may be Bartlett-corrected to...

This work is focused on identifying a circular pull production control system (PPCS) and make emphasis on the presence of a stability attribute. It is an introductory paper to an extended study of macroeconomic financial stability in a physically open but systemic closed system. Previous work...

In a presentation to the American Economics Association, McCloskey (1998) argued that "statistical significance is bankrupt" and that economists' time would be "better spent on finding out How Big Is Big". This brief survey is devoted to methods of determining "How Big Is Big". It is concerned...

For about twenty years, Deidre McCloskey has campaigned to convince the economics profession that it is hopelessly confused about statistical significance. She argues that many practices associated with significance testing are bad science and that most economists routinely employ these bad...

Using one of the key property of copulas that they remain invariant under an arbitrary monotonous change of variable, we investigate the null hypothesis that the dependence between financial assets can be modeled by the Gaussian copula. We find that most pairs of currencies and pairs of major...

I use numerical methods to test for the presence of one-time structural breaks in the conditional variance of nominal interest rate spreads in four European countries over a period of eleven years (Jan 1988 to Dec 1998). I start with an intuitive approach consisting of a sequence of breakpoint...

Testing for unit roots in short-term interest rates plays a key role in the empirical modelling of these series. It is widely assumed that the volatility of interest rates follows some time-varying function which is dependent of the level of the series. This may cause distortions in the...

In recent years two classes of switching models have been proposed, the Markov switching models, Hamilton (1989) and the Threshold Auto- Regressive Models (TAR), Lim and Tong (1980). These two models have the advantage of being able to modelize and capture asymmetry, sudden changes and...

This paper brings together a number of new specification search strategies in spatial econometric modeling. In the literature, experimental results for several forward stepwise strategies aimed at remedying spatial dependence, have been reported. Essentially, these strategies boil down to the...

In this paper I attempt at answering to the following question: is modern culture affected by amcient cultural heritage? Are Archimedes and Qin Shi Huang, Cicero and Shakespeare, and the like, still intellectually alive? Do the Parthenon and the Temple of Heaven, and the like, significantly...