More than 25 years after German reunification, key economic indicators for households living in eastern German regions are still below the western German levels. This particularly holds for private net wealth, which reaches only about 40% of the western German level. However, a more granular...

This paper incorporates the variance of auxiliary variables to propose three improved ratio estimators of population mean. To enhance the efficiency of the proposed ratio estimators, a linear combination of the population coefficient of variation, kurtosis, skewness and the population variance...

We propose a generic Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm to speed up computations for datasets with many observations. A key feature of our approach is the use of the highly efficient difference estimator from the survey sampling literature to estimate the log-likelihood accurately using...

This paper proposes a new bootstrap procedure for mean squared errors of robust smallarea estimators. We formally prove the asymptotic validity of the proposed bootstrap method and examine its finite sample performance through Monte Carlo simulations. The results show that our procedure performs...

The computing time for Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms can be prohibitively large for datasets with many observations, especially when the data density for each observation is costly to evaluate. We propose a framework where the likelihood function is estimated from a random subset of...

This paper reworks and expands on the results of existing simulation studies, investigating the performance of various robust estimators of scale for Tukey's three corner distributions. We focus attention on the popular biweight A-estimator, but also propose a new estimator based on the...

This paper presents a new approach to estimation and inference in panel data models with unobserved common factors possibly correlated with exogenously given individual-specific regressors and/or the observed common effects. The basic idea behind the proposed estimation procedure is to filter...

This paper shows how asymptotically valid inference in regression models based on the weighted least squares (WLS) estimator can be obtained even when the model for reweighting the data is misspecified. Like the ordinary least squares estimator, the WLS estimator can be accompanied by...

Portfolio sorting is ubiquitous in the empirical finance literature, where it has been widely used to identify pricing anomalies in different asset classes. Despite the popularity of portfolio sorting, little attention has been paid to the statistical properties of the procedure or to the...

This paper gives a relatively simple, well behaved solution to the problem of many instruments in heteroskedastic data. Such settings are common in microecono- metric applications where many instruments are used to improve efficiency and allowance for heteroskedasticity is generally important....