International large-scale assessments such as PISA are increasingly being used to benchmark the academic performance of young people across the world. Yet many of the technicalities underpinning these datasets are misunderstood by applied researchers, who sometimes fail to take their complex...

International large-scale assessments such as PISA are increasingly being used to benchmark the academic performance of young people across the world. Yet many of the technicalities underpinning these datasets are misunderstood by applied researchers, who sometimes fail to take their complex...

A method for medical screening is adapted to differential item functioning (DIF). Its essential elements are explicit declarations of the level of DIF that is acceptable and of the loss function that quantifies the consequences of the two kinds of inappropriate classification of an item. Instead...

In this note we consider several goodness-of-fit tests for model specification in non- parametric regression models which are based on kernel methods. In order to circumvent the problem of choosing a bandwidth for the corresponding test statistic we propose to consider the statistics as...

A new test for strict monotonicity of the regression function is proposed which is based on a composition of an estimate of the inverse of the regression function with a common regression estimate. This composition is equal to the identity if and only if the ?true? regression function is...

In a recent paper Lee and Na (2001) introduced a test for a parametric form of the distribution of the innovations in autoregressive models, which is based on the integrated squared error of the nonparametric density estimate from the residuals and a smoothed version of the parametric fit of the...

We derive new tests for proper calibration of multivariate density forecasts based on Rosenblatt probability integral transforms. These tests have the advantage that they i) do not depend on the ordering of variables in the forecasting model, ii) are applicable to densities of arbitrary...