In applied work economists often seek to relate a given response variable y to some causal parameter mu* associated with it. This parameter usually represents a summarization based on some explanatory variables of the distribution of y, such as a regression function, and treating it as a...

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...