Conventional wisdom says that the middle classes in many developed countries have recently suffered losses, in terms of both the share of the total population belonging to the middle class, and also their share in total income. Here, distribution-free methods are developed for inference on these...

We study the finite-sample properties of tests for overidentifying restrictions in linear regression models with a single endogenous regressor and weak instruments. Under the assumption of Gaussian disturbances, we derive expressions for a variety of test statistics as functions of eight...

The standard approach to indirect inference estimation considers that the auxiliary parameters, which carry the identifying information about the structural parameters of interest, are obtained from some recently identified vector of estimating equations. In contrast to this standard...

In this paper, we study the asymptotic behavior of the sequential empirical process and the sequential empirical copula process, both constructed from residuals of multivariate stochastic volatility models. Applications for the detection of structural changes and specification tests of the...

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...

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...

In this paper, we study the finite sample accuracy of confidence intervals for index functional built via parametric bootstrap, in the case of inequality indices. To estimate the parameters of the assumed parametric data generating distribution, we propose a Generalized Method of Moment...

In studying the asymptotic and finite sample properties of quasi-maximum likelihood (QML) estimators for the spatial linear regression models, much attention has been paid to the spatial lag dependence (SLD) model; little has been given to its companion, the spatial error dependence (SED) model....

Estimation results obtained by parametric models may be seriously misleading when the model is misspecified or poorly approximates the true model. This study proposes a test that jointly tests the specifications of multiple response probabilities in unordered multinomial choice models. The test...

Generalized Information Matrix Tests (GIMTs) have recently been used for detecting the presence of misspecification in regression models in both randomized controlled trials and observational studies. In this paper, a unified GIMT framework is developed for the purpose of identifying,...