This paper establishes monotonicity of the chi-square test statistic. As the more efficient parameter estimator is plugged into the test statistic, the degrees of freedom of the resulting chi-square test statistic monotonically increase.

What institutional configurations influence fertility patterns across countries? While family policies feature prominently in previous explanations, this article highlights the importance of housing in shaping family formation decisions. Housing costs, determined by state and market factors,...

The 'Generations and Gender Survey (GGS)' is an important data source for studying the dynamics of families and family relationships, it was out in Austria in 2008/09. After adjustment for age, sex, employment status, country of birth and living arrangements, we revealed a bias towards women...

The issue of normalization arises whenever two different values for a vector of unknown parameters imply the identical economic model. A normalization does not just imply a rule for selecting which point, among equivalent ones, to call the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE). It also governs the...

This paper focuses on fraud detection in surveys using Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) data as an example for testing newly methods proposed here. A statistical theorem referred to as Benford's Law states that in many sets of numerical data, the significant digits are not uniformly distributed, as...

This paper uses data on currency options prices for the exchange rates of the three largest new EU member states Poland, Czech Republic and Hungary vis-à-vis the euro and the US dollar to estimate the risk-neutral density (RND) functions and the density interval bands. Analysing the RNDs, we...

In terms of regulatory and economic capital, credit risk is the most significant risk faced by banks. We implement a credit risk model - based on publicly available information - with the aim of developing a tool to monitor credit risk in a sample of large and complex banking groups (LCBGs) in...

This paper explores the statistical properties of house-hold consumption-expenditure budget share distributions —defined as the share of household total expenditure spent for purchasing a specific category of commodities— for a large sample of Italian households in the period 1989-2004. We...

Ökonomische Unsicherheit ist nicht direkt beobachtbar. Eine Operationalisierung ist, Unsicherheit als Dispersion der in den Unternehmensbefragungen des ifo Instituts geäußerten Zukunftseinschätzungen zu messen. Auf den Geschäftserwartungen der befragten Unternehmen aufbauende...

We propose a new regression method to estimate the impact of explanatory variables on quantiles of the unconditional distribution of an outcome variable. The proposed method consists of running a regression of the (recentered) influence function (RIF) of the unconditional quantile on the...