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...

Let Y=μ∗(X)+ε, where μ∗ is unknown and E[ε|X]≠0 with positive probability but there exist instrumental variables W such that E[ε|W]=0 w.p.1. It is well known that such nonparametric regression models are generally “ill-posed” in the sense that the map from the data to μ∗ is not...

Abstract We introduce a notion of median uncorrelation that is a natural extension of mean (linear) uncorrelation. A scalar random variable Y is median uncorrelated with a k-dimensional random vector X if and only if the slope from an LAD regression of Y on X is zero. Using this simple...

Let Y denote an n x 1 vector of observations such that Y = [mu] + [sigma][var epsilon] where [mu] is an unknown n x 1 vector, [sigma] 0 is an unknown parameter, and [var epsilon] is an n x 1 vector of independent standard normal random variables. A linear regression analysis is often based on a...

Consider a model with parameter θ = (ψ, λ), where ψ is the parameter of interest, and let L(ψ, λ) denote the likelihood function. One approach to likelihood inference for ψ is to use an integrated likelihood function, in which λ is eliminated from L(ψ, λ) by integrating with respect to...