We provide an operational identification of the complete class of superlative index numbers to track the exact aggregator functions of economic aggregation theory. If an index number is linearly homogeneous and a second order approximation in a formal manner that we define, we prove the index to...

In this paper, concepts of income are discussed in view of the purpose of use and the actual circumstances. Main choices in defining income are presented in a general system. The national accounts is a multi-purpose framework. It should therefore contain several concepts of income.

In 2005, Germany’s system of national accounts was altered from so called fixed prices (prices of a fixed year, in the end 1995) to prices of the preceding year as basis for calculating macroeconomic time series in real terms. Compared to the previous SNA, the new system offers a wider range...

The paper develops a Balance of Payments (BOP)-consistent procedure for estimating unreported flows. Using data between 1990 and 2007, total unreported flows of selected Asian countries is estimated at $4.7 trillion, or more than 80% of the countries’ 2007 total gross domestic product. Results...

The transition density of a diffusion process does not admit an explicit expression in general, which prevents the full maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) based on discretely observed sample paths. Aït-Sahalia [J. Finance 54 (1999) 1361–1395; Econometrica 70 (2002) 223–262] proposed asymptotic...

This paper considers the problem of parameter estimation in a general class of semiparametric models when observations are subject to missingness at random. The semiparametric models allow for estimating functions that are non-smooth with respect to the parameter. We propose a nonparametric...

The conventional Wilcoxon/Mann-Whitney test can be invalid for comparing treatment effects in the presence of missing values or in observational studies. This is because the missingness of the outcomes or the participation in the treatments may depend on certain pre-treatment variables. We...

Markov processes are used in a wide range of disciplines, including finance. The transition densities of these processes are often unknown. However, the conditional characteristic functions are more likely to be available, especially for Lévy-driven processes. We propose an empirical likelihood...

We propose two tests for the equality of covariance matrices between two high-dimensional populations. One test is on the whole variance-covariance matrices, and the other is on offdiagonal sub-matrices which define the covariance between two non-overlapping segments of the high-dimensional...

Motivated by the latest effort to employ banded matrices to estimate a high-dimensional covariance Σ , we propose a test for Σ being banded with possible diverging bandwidth. The test is adaptive to the “large p , small n ” situations without assuming a specific parametric distribution for...