We review the use and the interpretation of some robustness concepts and techniques in some economic applications. We focus on estimation techniques in income distribution analysis and we discuss the reliability of inequality measures

Generalized linear latent variable models (GLLVMs), as defined by Bartholomew and Knott, enable modeling of relationships between manifest and latent variables. They extend structural equation modeling techniques, which are powerful tools in the social sciences. However, because of the...

Generalized Linear Latent Variables Models (GLLVM) enable the modeling of relationships between manifest and latent variables, where the manifest variables are distributed according to a distribution of the exponential family (e.g. binomial or normal) and to the multinomial distribution (for...

Filtering methods are powerful tools to estimate the hidden state of a state-space model from observations available in real time. However, they are known to be highly sensitive to the presence of small misspecifications of the underlying model and to outliers in the observation process. In this...

This paper studies the local robustness of estimators and tests for the conditional location and scale parameters in a strictly stationary time series model. We first derive optimal bounded-influence estimators for such settings under a conditionally Gaussian reference model. Based on these...

An important aspect of income distribution is the modelling of the data using an appropriate parametric model. This involves estimating the parameters of the models, given the data at hand. Income data are typically in grouped form. Moreover, they are not always reliable in that they may contain...