The dissertation consists of three essays. The main focus is set on semiparametric regression modeling, which embodies the strength of parametric and nonparametric regression models in terms of flexibility, dimensionality and interpretability. The first essay is “Some Recent Advances in...

In this article we highlight the main differences of available methods for the analysis of regression functions that are probably additive separable. We first discuss definition and interpretation of the most common estimators in practice. This is done by explaining the different ideas of...

Over the last four decades, several methods for selecting the smoothing parameter, generally called the bandwidth, have been introduced in kernel regression. They differ quite a bit, and although there already exist more selection methods than for any other regression smoother we can still see...

The Africa-Dummy has been identfied and different explanations for its appearance have been published. In this paper, the issue of the empirical identifcation of the Africa-Dummy is addressed. We introduce a fixed eff ects regression model to identify the Africa-Dummy in one regression step so...