In economics, rank-size regressions provide popular estimators of tail exponents of heavy-tailed distributions. We discuss the properties of this approach when the tail of the distribution is regularly varying rather than strictly Pareto. The estimator then over-estimates the true value in the...

The information contained in PP-plots is transformed into a single number. The resulting Harmonic Mass (HM) index is distribution free and its sample counterpart is shown to be consistent. For a wide class of CDFs the exact analytical expression of the distribution of the sample HM index is...

We show that Bertrand et al.'s (QJE 2015) finding of a sharp drop in the relative income distribution within married couples at the point where wives start to earn more than their husbands is unstable across different estimation procedures and varies across contexts. We apply the estimators by...

We consider semiparametric asymmetric kernel density estimators when the unknown density has support on [0, ∞). We provide a unifying framework which contains asymmetric kernel versions of several semiparametric density estimators considered previously in the literature. This framework allows...

There is increasing demand for models of time-varying and non-Gaussian dependencies for mul- tivariate time-series. Available models suffer from the curse of dimensionality or restrictive assumptions on the parameters and the distribution. A promising class of models are the hierarchical...

In this paper, we propose a method to evaluate the effect of a counterfactual change in the unconditional distribution of a single covariate on the unconditional distribution of an outcome variable of interest. Both fixed and infinitesimal changes are considered. We show that such effects are...

Recent advances in the econometric modelling of count data have often been based on the generalized method of moments (GMM). However, the two-step GMM procedure may perform poorly in small samples, and several empirical likelihood-based estimators have been suggested alternatively. In this paper...

Many non- and semi- parametric estimators have asymptotic properties that have been established under conditions that exclude the possibility of singular parts in the distribution. It is thus important to be able to test for absence of singularities. Methods of testing that focus on specific...

We propose a new asymptotic approximation for the sampling behavior of nonparametric estimates of the spectral density of a covariance stationary time series. According to the standard approach, the truncation lag grows slower than the sample size. We derive first order limiting distributions...

For multivariate Gaussian copula models with unknown margins and structured correlation matrices, a rank-based, semiparametrically effi cient estimator is proposed for the Euclidean copula parameter. This estimator is defined as a one-step update of a rank-based pilot estimator in the direction...