Using a comprehensive international trade data set we investigate empirical regularities (known as Zipf’s Law or the rank-size rule) for the distribution of the interaction between countries as measured by revealed comparative advantage. Using the recently developed estimator by Gabaix and...

A growing number of empirical studies provides evidence that dynamic properties of macroeconomic time series have been changing over time. Model-based procedures for the measurement of business cycles should therefore allow model parameters to adapt over time. In this paper the time dependencies...

This discussion paper has led to a publication in <A href="http://books.google.nl/books?id=_YdZrLu5MKEC&dq=allesintitel:+%22The+Refinement+of+Econometric+Estimation+and+Test+Procedures%22&lr=&source=gbs_navlinks_s"><B>The Refinement of Econometric Estimation and Test Procedures</B></A>.<P>An attempt is made to set rules for a fair and fruitful competition between alternative inference methods based on their performance in simulation experiments. This leads to a list of...</p></b></a>

Estimators of regression coefficients are known to be asymptotically normally distributed, provided certain regularity conditions are satisfied. In small samples and if the noise is not normally distributed, this can be a poor guide to the quality of the estimators. The paper addresses this...

We propose a new estimator, the thresholded scaled Lasso, in high dimensional threshold regressions. First, we establish an upper bound on the <I>ℓ</I><SUB>∞</SUB> estimation error of the scaled Lasso estimator of Lee et al. (2012). This is a non-trivial task as the literature on high-dimensional models has...</sub></i>

In simple static linear simultaneous equation models the empirical distributions of IV and OLS are examined under alternative sampling schemes and compared with their first-order asymptotic approximations. We demonstrate that the limiting distribution of consistent IV is not affected by...

We show that the Anderson-Rubin (AR) statistic is the sum of two independent piv-otal statistics. One statistic is a score statistic that tests location and the other statistictests misspecification. The chi-squared distribution of the location statistic has a degreesof freedom parameter that is...

This discussion paper resulted in a publication in <I>Economics Letters</I>. Vol. 79(2), pages 145-152.<P> The relative magnitudes are compared of successive terms in a higher-order asymptotic expansion of the bias of the LSDV estimator in dynamic panels. We find that the leading term accounts for the...</p></i>

The multivariate analysis of a panel of economic and financial time series with mixed frequencies is a challenging problem. The standard solution is to analyze the mix of monthly and quarterly time series jointly by means of a multivariate dynamic model with a monthly time index: artificial...

We study the strong consistency and asymptotic normality of the maximum likelihood estimator for a class of time series models driven by the score function of the predictive likelihood. This class of nonlinear dynamic models includes both new and existing observation driven time series models....