We consider minimax shrinkage estimation of a location vector of a spherically symmetric distribution under a loss function which is a concave function of the usual squared error loss. In particular for distributions which are scale mixtures of normals (and somewhat more generally), and for...

A smoothing spline is considered to propose a novel model for the time-varying quantile of the univariate time series using a state space approach. A correlation is further incorporated between the dependent variable and its one-step-ahead quantile. Using a Bayesian approach, an efficient Markov...

New economic geography focuses on the impact of falling transport costs on the spatial distribution of activities. However, it disregards the role of technological innovations, which are central to modern economic growth, as well as the role of migration costs, which are a strong impediment to...

This paper considers likelihood-based testing of the null hypothesis of <em>m0</em> components against the alternative of <em>m</em>0+1 components in a finite mixture model. The number of components is an important parameter in the applications of finite mixture models. Still, testing the number of components has...

This article empirically analyzes consumer behavior of watching TV dramas via case-based decision theory. This theory models consumer decision under uncertainty in product quality, based on subjective evaluations of previous purchases for similar goods. Our empirical analysis is concerned with...</i>

This paper evaluates the 1999 national income tax reform in Japan by comparing the social marginal costs of public funds (SMCFs) for changing the marginal tax rates in different income brackets before the reform occurred. To do so, we estimate the discrete choice model of labor supply using a...

There are more than 1,700 municipalities serving as insurers in Japan's system of National Health Insurance (NHI). The NHI has several institutional routes to buffer local premiums from abrupt changes in regional health demands that destabilize the NHI benefit expenditures. After briefly...

This paper is concerned with estimation of a predictive density with parametric constraints under Kullback-Leibler loss. When an invariance structure is embed- ded in the problem, general and unied conditions for the minimaxity of the best equivariant predictive density estimator are derived....

Forecasting welfare caseloads has grown in importance in Japan because of their recent rapid increase. Given that the forecasting literature on welfare caseloads only focuses on US cases and utilizes limited classes of forecasting models, this study employs multiple alternative methods in order...

We revisit Machina's local utility as a tool to analyze attitudes to multivariate risks. Using martingale embedding techniques, we show that for nonexpected utility maximizers choosing between multivariate prospects, aversion to multivariate mean preserving increases in risk is equivalent to the...