In an attempt to free bootstrap theory from the shackles of asymptotic considerations, this paper studies the possibility of justifying, or validating, the bootstrap, not by letting the sample size tend to infinity, but by considering the sequence of bootstrap P values obtained by iterating the...

Conventional wisdom says that the middle classes in many developed countries have recently suffered losses, in terms of both the share of the total population belonging to the middle class, and also their share in total income. Here, distribution-free methods are developed for inference on these...

Asymptotic and bootstrap tests are studied for testing whether there is a relation of stochastic dominance between two distributions. These tests have a null hypothesis of nondominance, with the advantage that, if this null is rejected, then all that is left is dominance. This also leads us to...