Conventional wisdom says that the middle classes in many developed countries have recently suffered losses, in terms of both the share of the total population belonging to the middle class, and also their share in total income. Here, distribution-free methods are developed for inference on these...

We study the finite-sample properties of tests for overidentifying restrictions in linear regression models with a single endogenous regressor and weak instruments. Under the assumption of Gaussian disturbances, we derive expressions for a variety of test statistics as functions of eight...

In a presentation to the American Economics Association, McCloskey (1998) argued that "statistical significance is bankrupt" and that economists' time would be "better spent on finding out How Big Is Big". This brief survey is devoted to methods of determining "How Big Is Big". It is concerned...

For about twenty years, Deidre McCloskey has campaigned to convince the economics profession that it is hopelessly confused about statistical significance. She argues that many practices associated with significance testing are bad science and that most economists routinely employ these bad...

The contribution of this paper is to investigate a particular form of lack of invariance of causality statements to changes in the conditioning information sets. Consider a discrete-time three-dimensional stochastic process z = (x, y1, y2)0. We want to study causality relationships between the...

In this paper, we study the finite sample accuracy of confidence intervals for index functional built via parametric bootstrap, in the case of inequality indices. To estimate the parameters of the assumed parametric data generating distribution, we propose a Generalized Method of Moment...

This paper proposes an approach to measure the extent of nonlinearity of the exposure of a financial asset to a given risk factor. The proposed measure exploits the decomposition of a conditional expectation into its linear and nonlinear components. We illustrate the method with the measurement...

In this paper, we borrow some of the key concepts of nonequilibrium statistical systems, to develop a framework for analyzing a self-organizing-optimizing system of independent interacting agents, with nonlinear dynamics at the macro level that is based on stochastic individual behavior at the...

As a basis for information recovery in open dynamic microeconomic systems, we emphasize the connection between adaptive intelligent behavior, causal entropy maximization and self-organized equilibrium seeking behavior. This entropy-based causal adaptive behavior framework permits the use of...

In studying the asymptotic and finite sample properties of quasi-maximum likelihood (QML) estimators for the spatial linear regression models, much attention has been paid to the spatial lag dependence (SLD) model; little has been given to its companion, the spatial error dependence (SED) model....