In this text, we review some recent developments in econometrics that may be of interest to specialists in other areas than economics, and we discuss some relations of econometric methodology with general themes of scientific methodology and philosophy of science, such as the falsifiability...

This paper deals with the relationship between knowledge, innovation and regional growth. The study is carried out through the application of nonparametric estimation methods to European data at NUTS2 level. We provide evidence that the share of innovative ...firms plays a more relevant role in...

In this paper, we present a nonparametric comparative efficiency analysis of 179 communal public transport bus companies in Germany (1990-2004). We apply both deterministic data envelopment analysis (DEA) and bootstrapping to test the robustness of our estimates and to test the hypothesis of...

In this paper we investigate the existence and shape of the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) by means of nonparametric methods. We also investigate the issues involved in the choice of nonparametric estimator. We find that the nature of the economic relationship and the quality of environmental...

Directional distances provide useful, flexible measures of technical efficiency of production units relative to the efficient frontier of the attainable set in input-output space. In addition, the additive nature of directional distances permits negative input or outputs quantities. The choice...

We assess the impact of the sovereign risk spill-overs onto corporate cost of borrowing in selected euro area countries. We utilize a novel nonparametric dependence filtering frame- work to remove the effects of sovereign risk in the interest rate pass-through context. The main findings confirm...

Summary This note investigates the structure of dominance relations in daily returns of 32 German assets during the 1990s. We focus on stochastic dominance of first, second and third order but meanvariance and mean-Gini dominance is also considered. Efficient (i. e., nondominated) sets of assets...