In this paper we use Monte Carlo simulation to investigate the impact of effect size heterogeneity on the results of a meta-analysis. Specifically, we address the small sample behaviour of the OLS, the fixed effects regression and the mixed effects meta-estimators under three alternative...

A test for serial independence is proposed which is related to the BDS test but focuses on tail event probabilities rather than probabilities near the center of the distribution. The motivation behind this approach is to obtain a test more suitable for detecting structure in the tails, such as...

By combining two alternative formulations of a test statistic with two alternative resampling schemes we obtain four different bootstrap tests. In the context of static linear regression models two of these are shown to have serious size and power problems, whereas the remaining two are adequate...

Misspecifications and differences in operational definitions of elasticities in primary studies carry over to meta-analysis results. We show that the current practice of accounting for such primary study aber-rations in a meta-analysis by means of dummy variables goes a long way in mitigating...

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,...

We propose a quantification of the p-p plot that assigns equal weight to all distances between the respective distributions: the surface between the p-p plot and the diagonal. This surface is labelled the Harmonic Weighted Mass (HWM) index. We introduce the diagonal-deviation (d-d) plot that...

Economists increasingly pay attention to social capital as an important determinant of macroeconomic growth performance. At the same time, there is discussion regarding the robustness of the results of empirical growth studies. In a seminal paper, Knack and Keefer (1997) assess the effect of...

This paper introduces a representation of an integrated vector time series in which the coefficient of multiple correlation computed from the long-run covariance matrix of the innovation sequences is a primitive parameter of the model. Based on this representation, a notion of near cointegration...

Existing indices measuring the spatial distribution of economic activity such as the Krugman Specialisation Index, the Hirschmann-Herfindahl index and the Ellison-Glaeser index typically do not take into account the spatial structure of the data. In this paper, we first consider traditional...

Spatial effects are endemic in models based on spatially referenced data. The increased awareness of the relevance of spatial interactions, spatial externalities and networking effects among actors, evoked the area of spatial econometrics. Spatial econometrics focuses on the specification and...