A non-parametric framework for testing the existence of aggregates is developed. The framework is based on the notion of the maximum entropy formalism which is applied to model the size distribution of firms. The theory, once presented, is applied to the US banking industry in order to test for...

Given the objective of estimating the unknown parameters of a possibly nonlinear dynamic model using a finite (and relatively small) data set, it is common to use a Kalman filter Maximum Likelihood (ML) approach, ML-type estimators or more recently a GMM (Imbens, Spady and Johnson, 1998), BMOM...