This paper presents a methodological update to the World Bank's toolkit for small area estimation. The paper reviews the computational procedures of the current methods used by the institution: the traditional ELL approach and the Empirical Best (EB) addition introduced to imitate the original...

This paper estimates the causal impact of investment in information andcommunication technologies (ICT) on student performances in mathematics asmeasured in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2012 for Spain.To do this we apply a new methodology in this context known as...

The comparison of the means of two independent samples is one of the most popular problems in real-world data analysis. In the multivariate context, two-sample Hotelling's T² frequently used to test the equality of means of two independent Gaussian random samples assuming either the same or a...

In the context of Dynamic Factor Models (DFM), we compare point and interval estimates of the underlying unobserved factors extracted using small and big-data procedures. Our paper differs from previous works in the related literature in several ways. First, we focus on factor extraction rather...

In economics, insurance and finance, value at risk (VaR) is a widely used measure of the risk of loss on a specific portfolio of financial assets. For a given portfolio, time horizon, and probability alfa, the 100alfa% VaR is defined as a threshold loss value, such that the probability that the...

In the context of functional data analysis, we propose a new method to test the homogeneity of families of functions. Based on some well-known depth measures, we construct four different statistics in order to measure distance between the two families. A simulation study is performed to check...