We derive analytic expressions for the biases, to O(n-1) of the maximum likelihood estimators of the parameters of the generalized Pareto distribution. Using these expressions to bias-correct the estimators is found to be extremely effective in terms of bias reduction, and generally results in...

We derive an analytic expression for the bias, to O(n-1) of the maximum likelihood estimator of the scale parameter in the half-logistic distribution. Using this expression to bias-correct the estimator is shown to be very effective in terms of bias reduction, without adverse consequences for...

We model the durations between firms’ “Initial Public Offerings” (IPOs) and their subsequent “Seasoned Equity Offerings” (SEOs) in China during the period from 1 January 2001 to 1 July 2006. Duration analysis is applied by using the nonparametric Kaplan-Meier estimator of the hazard...

The Topp-Leone distribution is attractive for reliability studies as it has finite support and a bathtub-shaped hazard function. We compare some properties of the method of moments, maximum likelihood, and bias-adjusted maximum likelihood estimators of its shape parameter. The last of these...

Using small-disturbance expansions, we derive analytic expressions for the bias of the OLS estimator an elasticity in a linear model, both at an individual sample point and at the sample mean. The magnitudes of these biases are illustrated with Australian expenditure data.

We use survival models to analyze the duration of the spells associated with the interest rate used by the Bank of Canada as its monetary policy instrument. Both non-parametric and parametric models are estimated, allowing for right-censoring of the data, and time-varying covariates. We find...

This paper tests for unconditional and conditional income convergence among provinces in Canada during the period 1981-2001. We apply the first-differenced GMM estimation technique to the dynamic Solow growth model and compare the results with the other panel data approaches such as fixed and...

The Anderson-Darling goodness-of-fit test has a highly skewed and non-standard limit distribution. Various attempts have been made to tabulate the associated critical points, using both theoretical approximations and simulation methods. We show that a standard saddlepoint approximation performs...

This paper first derives an adaptive estimator when heteroskedasticity is present in the unit-specific error in an error component model and then compares the finite sample performance of the proposed estimator with various other estimators. While the Monte Carlo results show that the proposed...

We show that certain the winning bids for certain ebaY auctions obey Benford’s Law. One implication of this is that it is unlikely that these bids are subject to collusion among bidders, or “shilling” on the part of sellers. Parenthetically, we also show that numbers from the naturally...