This paper proposes a nonparametric test for conditional independence that is easy to implement, yet powerful in the sense that it is consistent and achieves root-n local power. The test statistic is based on an estimator of the topological "distance" between restricted and unrestricted...

When Barret and Donald (2003) in Econometrica proposed a consistent test of stochastic dominance, they were silent about the asymptotic unbiasedness of their tests against √n-converging Pitman local alternatives. This paper shows that when we focus on first-order stochastic dominance, there...

The causal notions embodied in the concept of Granger causality have been argued to belong to a different category than those of Judea Pearl's Causal Model, and so far their relation has remained obscure. Here, we demonstrate that these concepts are in fact closely linked by showing how each...

Let f(y|x,z) (resp. f(y|x) be the conditional density of Y given (X,Z) (resp. X). We construct a class of `smoothed` empirical likelihood-based tests for the conditional independence hypothesis: Pr[f(Y|X,Z)=f(Y|X)]=1. We show that the test statistics are asymptotically normal under the null...