The Paper analyses both the Conference Board as well as the OECD Leading Indicators concerning their forecasting properties of overall economic activity. For this purpose the two indicators are introduced separately and several in-sample and out-of-sample tests are being conducted. The main...

The classical approach to testing for structural change employs retrospective tests using a historical data set of a given length. Here we consider a wide array of fluctuation-type tests in a monitoring situation – given a history period for which a regression relationship is known to be...

The paper presents an approach to the analysis of data that contains (multiple) structural changes in a linear regression setup. We implement various strategies which have been suggested in the literature for testing against structural changes as well as a dynamic programming algorithm for the...

We derive the limiting null distributions of the standard and OLS based CUSUM-tests for structural change of the coecients of a linear regression model in the context of long memory disturbances. We show that both tests behave fundamentally different in a long memory environment, as compared to...

I expose the risk of false discoveries in the context of multiple treatment effects. A false discovery is a nonexistent effect that is falsely labeled as statistically significant by its individual t-value. Labeling nonexistent effects as statistically significant has wide-ranging academic and...

This paper considers parametric estimation problems with independent, identically,non-regularly distributed data. It focuses on rate-effciency, in the sense of maximal possible convergence rates of stochastically bounded estimators, as an optimality criterion,largely unexplored in parametric...

This paper considers parametric estimation problems with i.i.d. data. It focusses on rate-effciency, in the sense of maximal possible convergence rates of stochastically bounded estimators, as an optimality criterion, largely unexplored in parametric estimation. Under mild conditions, the...

We consider the identification of the average treatment effect in models with continuous endogenous variables whose impact is heterogeneous. We derive a testable restriction that allows us to assess the degree of unobserved heterogeneity. Our analysis uses assumptions relating to the Local...

We study linear factor models under the assumptions that factors are mutually independent and independent of errors, and errors can be correlated to some extent. Under factor non-Gaussianity, second to fourth-order moments are shown to yield full identification of the matrix of factor loadings....

When a significance test fails to disconfirm a hypothesis economist often interpret this as evidence that this hypothesis is valid. Six such examples are cited from recent journals. But this is a misinterpretation of what significance tests show. Presumably this misinterpretation is founded on...