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...

Despite much recent work on the finite-sample properties of estimators and tests for linear regression models with a single endogenous regressor and weak instruments, little attention has been paid to tests for overidentifying restrictions in these circumstances. We study asymptotic tests for...

We derive the asymptotic sampling distribution of various estimators frequently used to order distributions in terms of poverty, welfare and inequality. This includes estimators of most of the poverty indices currently in use, as well as estimators of the curves used to infer stochastic...

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...

The fast double bootstrap can improve considerably on the single bootstrap when the bootstrapped statistic is approximately independent of the bootstrap DGP. This is because, among the approximations that underlie the fast double bootstrap (FDB), is the assumption of such independence. In this...

This paper examines two explanations of the observed positive relationship between inflation rates and saving rates in Canada and the United States. Several models are estimated using quarterly time series data from both countries, and the best of these are subjected to a variety of tests. One...

We propose several Lagrange Multiplier tests of logit and probit models, which may be inexpensively computed by artificial linear regressions. These may be used to test for omitted variables and heteroskedasticity. We argue that one of these tests is likely to have better small-sample...

We develop simple procedures to test for omitted variables and perform other tests in regression directions, which are asymptotically valid in the presence of heteroskedasticity of unknown form. We examine the asymptotic behaviour of these tests, and use Edgeworth approximations to study their...