Over the last four decades, several methods for selecting the smoothing parameter, generally called the bandwidth, have been introduced in kernel regression. They differ quite a bit, and although there already exist more selection methods than for any other regression smoother we can still see...

This article proposes a simple and fast approach to build simultaneous confi dence bands and perform specification tests for smooth curves in additive models. The method allows for handling of spatially heterogeneous functions and its derivatives as well as heteroscedasticity in the data. It is...

The Africa-Dummy has been identfi ed and different explanations for its appearance have been published. In this paper, the issue of the empirical identifcation of the Africa-Dummy is addressed. We introduce a fixed effects regression model to identify the Africa-Dummy in one regression step so...