We develop uniformly valid confidence regions for a regression coefficient in a high-dimensional sparse LAD (least absolute deviation or median) regression model. The setting is one where the number of regressors p could be large in comparison to the sample size n, but only s n of them are...

Cultural factors and especially common languages are well-known determinants of trade. By contrast, the knowledge of foreign languages was not explored in the literature so far. We combine traditional gravity models with data on fluency in the main languages used in EU and candidate countries....

Using the Reinhart-Rogoff dataset, we find a debt threshold not around 90 percent but around 30 percent above which the median real GDP growth falls abruptly. Our work is the first to formally test for threshold effects in the relationship between public debt and median real GDP growth. The null...

We suggest several goodness-of-fit (GOF) methods which are appropriate with Type-II right censored data. Our strategy is to transform the original observations from a censored sample into an approximately i.i.d. sample of normal variates and then perform a standard GOF test for normality on the...

The extensions of the entropy and Kullback–Leibler (KL) information to the cumulative distribution function have been recently studied because they are well defined on the empirical distribution function. In this paper, we generalize the extended KL information to the censored case and propose...

<p><span style="font-size: 11.000000pt; font-family: 'CMR10';">In the paper we study the impact of incomplete information to precision of results of stochastic optimization. It is assumed that the stochastic characteristics of optimized system are evaluated from the data. However, the observations can be incom- plete, namely, we consider the random...</span></p>

In this paper we use household survey data to study the determinants of children’s educational achievement in Uruguay. As an indicator of this educational achievement, we build the “educational gap” which is the difference between expected years of schooling of a child and actual years of...