This paper considers the issue of actuarial fairness of the new Italian public pension system in view of the recent trends in old-age mortality and the survival differences by gender, birth cohort and region of residence.3 Section 2 reviews the secular trends in elderly mortality in Italy,...

Mean heights are often used to measure living standards for times and places in which other economic indicators are not available. We propose a novel approach to modeling the distribution of heights, which does not rely on common but often-unwarranted assumptions such as normality. We construct...

The European Community Household Panel (ECHP) is a standardized multi-purpose annual longitudinal survey carried out at the level of the European Union. It is centrally designed and coordinated by the Statistical Office of the European Communities (Eurostat), and covers demographics, labor force...

This paper investigates the local robustness properties of a general class of multidimensional tests based on <italic>M</italic>-estimators. These tests are shown to inherit the efficiency and robustness properties of the estimators on which they are based. In particular, it is shown that small perturbations of...