Cultural factors and especially common languages are well-known determinants of trade. By contrast, the knowledge of foreign languages was not explored in the literature so far. We combine traditional gravity models with data on fluency in the main languages used in EU and candidate countries....

We develop uniformly valid confidence regions for a regression coefficient in a high-dimensional sparse LAD (least absolute deviation or median) regression model. The setting is one where the number of regressors p could be large in comparison to the sample size n, but only s n of them are...

Using the Reinhart-Rogoff dataset, we find a debt threshold not around 90 percent but around 30 percent above which the median real GDP growth falls abruptly. Our work is the first to formally test for threshold effects in the relationship between public debt and median real GDP growth. The null...

Econometric analyses in the happiness literature typically use subjective well-being (SWB) data to compare the mean of observed or latent happiness across samples. Recent critiques show that com-paring the mean of ordinal data is only valid under strong assumptions that are usually rejected by...

This paper is concerned with the problem of variable selection when the marginal effects of signals on the target variable as well as the correlation of the covariates in the active set are allowed to vary over time, without committing to any particular model of parameter instabilities. It poses...

The influence of maternal health problems on child's worrying status is important in practice in terms of the intervention of maternal health problems early for the influence on child's worrying status. Conventional methods apply symmetric prior distributions such as a normal distribution or a...

We consider estimation of a linear or nonparametric additive model in which a few coefficients or additive components are "large" and may be objects of substantive interest, whereas others are "small" but not necessarily zero. The number of small coefficients or additive components may exceed...