Item response theory is one of the modern test theories with applications in educational and psychological testing. Recent developments made it possible to characterize some desired properties in terms of a collection of manifest ones, so that hypothesis tests on these traits can, in principle,...

In this paper we use Monte Carlo simulation to investigate the impact of effect size heterogeneity on the results of a meta-analysis. Specifically, we address the small sample behaviour of the OLS, the fixed effects regression and the mixed effects meta-estimators under three alternative...

A test for serial independence is proposed which is related to the BDS test but focuses on tail event probabilities rather than probabilities near the center of the distribution. The motivation behind this approach is to obtain a test more suitable for detecting structure in the tails, such as...

Misspecifications and differences in operational definitions of elasticities in primary studies carry over to meta-analysis results. We show that the current practice of accounting for such primary study aber-rations in a meta-analysis by means of dummy variables goes a long way in mitigating...

P-p plots contain all the information that is needed for scale-invariant comparisons. Indeed, Empirical Distribution Function (EDF) tests translate sample p-p plots into a single number. In this paper we characterize the set of all distinct p-p plots for two balanced sample of size <I>n</I> absent...</i>

Patton and Timmermann (2011, 'Forecast Rationality Tests Based on Multi-Horizon Bounds', <I>Journal of Business & Economic Statistics</I>, forthcoming) propose a set of useful tests for forecast rationality or optimality under squared error loss, including an easily implemented test based on a...</i>

The system GMM estimator for dynamic panel data models combines moment conditions for the model in first differences with moment conditions for the model in levels. It has been shown to improve on the GMM estimator in the first differenced model in terms of bias and root mean squared error....

We propose a quantification of the p-p plot that assigns equal weight to all distances between the respective distributions: the surface between the p-p plot and the diagonal. This surface is labelled the Harmonic Weighted Mass (HWM) index. We introduce the diagonal-deviation (d-d) plot that...

Economists increasingly pay attention to social capital as an important determinant of macroeconomic growth performance. At the same time, there is discussion regarding the robustness of the results of empirical growth studies. In a seminal paper, Knack and Keefer (1997) assess the effect of...