Clinical trials of micronutrient supplementation are aimed at reducing the risk of infant mortality by increasing birth weight. Because infant mortality is greatest among the low birth weight (LBW) infants (2500 g or under), an effective intervention increases the birth weight among the...

We propose a novel approach to estimating the mean difference between two highly skewed distributions. The method, which we call smooth quantile ratio estimation, smooths, over percentiles, the ratio of the quantiles of the two distributions. The method defines a large class of estimators,...