Previous research has argued that foreign direct investment (FDI) exerts a positive and causal impact on the productivity of the recipient countries. However, we find that there is little macroeconomic evidence that FDI fosters productivity growth in recipient countries, including in those with...

Small area estimation techniques have typically relied on plug-in estimation based on models containing random area effects. More recently, regression M-quantiles have been suggested for this purpose, thus avoiding conventional Gaussian assumptions, as well as problems associated with the...

Linear regression is widely-used in finance. While the standard method to obtain parameter estimates, Least Squares, has very appealing theoretical and numerical properties, obtained estimates are often unstable in the presence of extreme observations which are rather common in financial time...

Good robust estimators can be tuned to combine a high breakdown point and a specified asymptotic efficiency at a central model. This happens in regression with MM- and τ-estimators among others. However, the finite-sample efficiency of these estimators can be much lower than the asymptotic one....