Das Vertrauen der Bevölkerung gegenüber der Wissenschaft hängt in starkem Maß von der Art der Vermittlung wissenschaftlicher Erkenntnisse ab. Dabei ist es entscheidend, durch eine adäquate Interpretation statistischer Analysen eine vernünftige Bewertung der Zuverlässigkeit...

Spanish Abstract: En este ensayo muestro que los modelos teóricos en finanzas y economía se usan de un modo que los vuelven “camaleones”, y que los camaleones devalúan la moneda intelectual y enturbian los debates de política. Un modelo se convierte en camaleón cuando se basa en...

Financial education programs enjoy widespread governmental and financial industry support. They are considered an important tool for improving financial literacy, encouraging financial inclusion, and increasing consumer financial protection. Therefore, assessing their effectiveness is important...

In many areas of science including business disciplines, statistical decisions are often made almost exclusively at a conventional level of significance. Serious concerns have been raised that this contributes to a range of ill-practices such as p-hacking and data-mining that undermine research...

This note demonstrates that in applied regression analysis, the variance of a coefficient of interest may decrease from the inclusion of a control variable, contrasting with Clarke’s assertion (2005, 2009) that the variance can only increase or stay the same. Practitioners may thus be...

We provide a methodology for testing a polynomial model hypothesis by extending the approach and results of Baek, Cho, and Phillips (2015; Journal of Econometrics; BCP) that tests for neglected nonlinearity using power transforms of regressors against arbitrary nonlinearity. We examine and...

When testing hypotheses, problems of omitted variables / confounding variables arise, understood as variables, which determine both, the variable seen as dependent and the variables seen as independent, resulting in spurious correlations among both. Experimental approaches counter this problem...

Epidemics invite “pariah-tization.” By this, I mean the process of stigmatizing one marginalized and impotent segment of society as being the group most vulnerable to the disease at hand- without reliable scientific basis. Doing so allows those in power, the young, the rich, the...

Statistical inference can be described as the process of drawing conclusions about a population or process based on sample data. This chapter outlines the logic of “classical” or “frequentist” methods for such inference. Three commonly used concepts for assessing statistical error are...