In this paper we consider the problem of testing for equality of two density or two conditional density functions defined over mixed discrete and continuous variables. We smooth both the discrete and continuous variables, with the smoothing parameters chosen via least-squares cross-validation....

The phenomenon that married men earn higher average wages than unmarried men, the so-called marriage premium, is well known. However, the robustness of the marriage premium across the wage distribution and the underlying causes of the marriage premium deserve closer scrutiny. Focusing on the...

We consider a metric entropy capable of detecting deviations from symmetry that is suitable for both discrete and continuous processes. A test statistic is constructed from an integrated normed difference between nonparametric estimates of two density functions. The null distribution (symmetry)...

Measures of multivariate well-being, such as poverty or inequality, are scalar functions of matrices of several attributes, m, associated with a number of individual or households, N. This entails inevitable "aggregation" and summarization over individuals as well as attributes. There is no...

The paper focuses on the robustness of rankings of academic journal quality and research impact in general, and in Economics, in particular, based on the widely-used Thomson Reuters ISI Web of Science citations database (ISI). The paper analyses 299 leading international journals in Economics...

We propose a new technique for identification and estimation of aggregation functions in multidimensional evaluations and multiple indicator settings. These functions may represent "latent" objects. They occur in many different contexts, for instance in propensity scores, multivariate measures...

This paper presents a set of complementary tools for measurement and analysis of the gender gap that move beyond the simple moment-based comparison of the earnings distributions. In particular, we propose a new measure of the gender gap based on the the distance between two whole distributions,...

In this paper, we employ stochastic dominance analysis on Chinese Household Nutrition Survey (CHNS) data to investigate the inequality and relative welfare levels in China over time and among population subgroups. We find that from the period of 2000 to 2009, welfare has been continuously...