The paper discusses the effect of model deviations such as data contamination on the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) for a general class of latent trait models (citeNP{MoKn:00}). This is done with the use of the influence function (Hampel 1968, 1974) a mathematical tool to assess the...

In this paper robustness properties of the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) and several robust estimators for the logistic regression model when the responses are binary are analysed. It is found that the MLE and the classical Rao's score test can be misleading in the presence of model...

We show how a collection of results in the literature on the empirical estimation of welfare indicators from sample data can be unified. We also demonstrate how some of these ideas can be extended to empirically important cases where the data have been trimmed or censored

Lorenz curves and associated tools for ranking income distributions are commonly estimated on the assumption that full, unbiased samples are available. However, it is common to find income and wealth distributions that are routinely censored or trimmed. We derive the sampling distribution for a...