This paper considers empirical tests for the contagion of financial crises that address the endogeneity of contagion by using instrumental variable estimation techniques. Two complications in the application to contagion are that the regression model is potentially incoherent and that it...

In this survey, we evaluate estimators by comparing their asymptotic variances. The role of the efficiency bound, in this context, is to give a lower bound to the asymptotic variance of an estimator. An estimator with asymptotic variance equal to the efficiency bound can therefore be said to be...

Here we present a selected survey in which we attempt to break down the ever burgeoning literature on inference in the presence of weak instruments into issues of estimation, hypothesis testing and confidence interval construction. Within this literature a variety of different approaches have...