In the aftermath of the financial and sovereign debt crisis, the need for a better understanding of the fiscal and equity implications of national tax policy reforms is greater than ever. National fiscal policies have a significant share in paving the way for economic recovery, fiscal...

This article will survey issues in analyzing complex survey data and describe some of the capabilities of Stata for such analyses. We will briefly review key elements of survey design and explain the effects of different design features on bias and variance. We compare different methods of...

The scientific use file of the German Microcensus now provides sample information which enables its users to calculate the variance of population estimates. However, not all relevant information on clustering and stratification is at hand. A solution is presented which uses the information of...

We introduce a measure of diversification for portfolios comprising d risky assets. This measure relates the smallest possible return variance among these d assets to the overall portfolio return variance, yielding the portion of non-diversifiable risk. In the context of normally distributed...

We study the distribution of hard-, soft-, and adaptive soft-thresholding estimators within a linear regression model where the number of parameters k can depend on sample size n and may diverge with n. In addition to the case of known error-variance, we define and study versions of the...