This paper greatly extends the results of Ai and Chen (2003) on efficient estimation of semiparametric conditional moment models containing unknown parametric components (theta) and unknown functions of endogenous variables (h). We show that (1) the penalized sieve minimum distance (PSMD)...

Various versions of the wild bootstrap are studied as applied to regression models with heteroskedastic errors. It is shown that some versions can be qualified as amp;apos'tamedamp;apos', in the sense that the statistic bootstrapped is asymptotically independent of the distribution of the wild...

Graph-theoretic methods of causal search based in the ideas of Pearl (2000), Spirtes, Glymour, and Scheines (2000), and others have been applied by a number of researchers to economic data, particularly by Swanson and Granger (1997) to the problem of finding a data-based contemporaneous causal...

We propose two new procedures for comparing the mean squared prediction error (MSPE) of a benchmark model to the MSPEs of a small set of alternative models that nest the benchmark. Our procedures compare the benchmark to all the alternative models simultaneously rather than sequentially, and do...

Using bootstrap panel analysis, allowing for cross-country correlation, without the need of pre-testing for unit roots, we study the causality between government revenue and spending for the EU in the period 1960-2006. Spend-and-tax causality is found for Italy, France, Spain, Greece, and...

Optimization of simulated systems is tackled by many methods, but most methods assume known environments. This article, however, develops a 'robust' methodology for uncertain environments. This methodology uses Taguchi's view of the uncertain world, but replaces his statistical techniques by...

The bootstrap is, at heart, a way to obtain an approximate sampling distribution for a statistic (and hence, if required, produce a confidence interval). Where that statistic is a suitable estimator for a population parameter of interest, the bootstrap enables inferences about that parameter. In...

After a decade of economic reforms that dramatically altered the structure of economies in Latin America, making them more open and more competitive, and a decade of substantial increases in public spending on education, health and other social programs in virtually all countries, poverty and...