White (1980) marked the beginning of a new era for inference in econometrics. It introduced the revolutionary idea of inference that is robust to heteroskedasticity of unknown form, an idea that was very soon extended to other forms of robust inference and also led to many new estimation...

As I document using evidence from a journal data repository that I manage, the datasets used in empirical work are getting larger. When we use very large datasets, it can be dangerous to rely on standard methods for statistical inference. In addition, we need to worry about computational issues....