Conventional wisdom says that the middle classes in many developed countries have recently suffered losses, in terms of both the share of the total population belonging to the middle class, and also their share in total income. Here, distribution-free methods are developed for inference on these...

As I document using evidence from a journal data repository that I manage, the datasets used in empirical work are getting larger. When we use very large datasets, it can be dangerous to rely on standard methods for statistical inference. In addition, we need to worry about computational issues....

We provide new and computationally attractive methods, based on jackknifing by cluster, to obtain cluster-robust variance matrix estimators (CRVEs) for linear regres- sion models estimated by least squares. These estimators have previously been com- putationally infeasible except for small...

Economists are often interested in the coefficient of a single endogenous explanatory variable in a linear simultaneous equations model. One way to obtain a confidence set for this coefficient is to invert the Anderson-Rubin test. The AR confidence sets that result have correct coverage under...

We study several methods of constructing confidence sets for the coefficient of the single right-hand-side endogenous variable in a linear equation with weak instruments. Two of these are based on conditional likelihood ratio (CLR) tests, and the others are based on inverting t statistics or the...

Conventional wisdom says that the middle classes in many developed countries have recently suffered losses, in terms of both the share of the total population belonging to the middle class, and also their share in total income. Here, distribution-free methods are developed for inference on these...

Bayesians and non-Bayesians, often called frequentists, seem to be perpetually at logger- heads on fundamental questions of statistical inference. This paper takes as agnostic a stand as is possible for a practising frequentist, and tries to elicit a Bayesian answer to questions of interest to...

We study several tests for the coefficient of the single right-hand-side endogenous variable in a linear equation estimated by instrumental variables. We show that writing all the test statistics—Student's t, Anderson-Rubin, the LM statistic of Kleibergen and Moreira (K), and likelihood ratio...

Testing for a unit root in a series obtained by summing a stationary MA(1) process with a parameter close to -1 leads to serious size distortions under the null, on account of the near cancellation of the unit root by the MA component in the driving stationary series. The situation is analysed...