When a nuisance parameter is unidentified under the null hypothesis, standard testing procedures cannot be applied due to the singularity of the information matrix. Probably best known examples are the problems of unknown change points and the mixtures of distributions in econometrics and...

This dissertation concerns theoretical and empirical aspects of a class of conditionally heteroskedastic models. We apply the White's information matrix (IM) test to the linear regression model with autocorrelated errors. A special case of one component of the test is found to be identical to...

This paper mainly focuses on finding optimal strategies for the development of microfinance in Korea and on predicting the impact of microfinance in the future.First, this paper reviews and assesses the impact of microfinance in Korea. I suggested that recent phenomena of income polarization and...

This dissertation is a collection of three essays on high school dropout by adolescents and the roll of their siblings in this risky behavior. Dropping out of high school can scar the individual for his entire labor supply period with lower earnings, higher unemployment, and in turn incur...

The impact of an ageing population on the economy is one of the key issues in most developed countries. It is a generally accepted notion that an ageing population could cause negative effects, including a decrease of per-capita output and economic welfare, on the economy mainly due to the...

Following Farrell's (1957) definitions of firm's technical and allocative efficiencies and the formulation of composite error stochastic frontier model by Aigner, Lovell and Schmidt (1977), a substantial amount of research work has been performed measuring firm's technical inefficiency using...

The performance and economic value of public outlook forecasts has been of continuing interest to agricultural economists and market participants. This dissertation provide new and powerful evidence on the performance of outlook forecasts relative to futures prices in hog and cattle markets over...

This dissertation concerns with some estimations of heteroskedastic models and tests for heteroskedasticity. We reconsider the minimum norm quadratic unbiased estimation (MINQUE) to obtain an alternative estimator of variance-covariance matrix in heteroskedastic models. We derive the analytical...

This paper derives unbalanced versions of the tests statistics for ¯rst order serial correlation and random individual e®ects summarized in Sosa Escudero and Bera (2001), and updates their xttest1 routine. The derived tests statistics should be useful for applied researchers faced with the...

Fractile Graphical Analysis (FGA) was proposed by Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis in 1961 as a method for comparing two distributions at two different points (of time or space) controlling for the rank of a covariate through fractile groups. We use bootstrap techniques to formalize the heuristic...