This paper proposes a test of the rank of the submatrix of β, where β is a cointegrating matrix. In addition, the submatrix of β⊥, an orthogonal complement to β, is investigated. We construct the test statistic by using the eigenvalues of the quadratic form of the submatrix. We show that the test statistic has a limiting chi-square distribution when data are nontrending, whereas for trending data we have to consider a conservative test or other testing procedure that requires the pretest of the structure of the matrix. Finite sample simulations show that, although the simulation settings are limited, the proposed test works well for nontrending data, whereas we have to carefully use the test for trending data because it may become too conservative in some cases.I owe special thanks to two anonymous referees, the co-editor, Pierre Perron, and Taku Yamamoto. All errors are my responsibility. This research was supported by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology under grants-in-aid 13730023 and 14203003.

A Bayesian reference analysis of the cointegrated vector autoregression is presented based on a new prior distribution. Among other properties, it is shown that this prior distribution distributes its probability mass uniformly over all cointegration spaces for a given cointegration rank and is invariant to the choice of normalizing variables for the cointegration vectors. Several methods for computing the posterior distribution of the number of cointegrating relations and distribution of the model parameters for a given number of relations are proposed, including an efficient Gibbs sampling approach where all inferences are determined from the same posterior sample. Simulated data are used to illustrate the procedures and for discussing the well-known issue of local nonidentification.The author thanks Luc Bauwens, Anant Kshirsagar, Peter Phillips, Herman van Dijk, four anonymous referees, and especially Daniel Thorburn for helpful comments. Financial support from the Swedish Council of Research in Humanities and Social Sciences (HSFR) grant F0582/1999 and Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet) grant 412-2002-1007 is gratefully acknowledged. The views expressed in this paper are solely the responsibility of the author and should not be interpreted as reflecting the views of the Executive Board of Sveriges Riksbank.

In frontier analysis, most of the nonparametric approaches (free disposal hull [FDH], data envelopment analysis [DEA]) are based on envelopment ideas, and their statistical theory is now mostly available. However, by construction, they are very sensitive to outliers. Recently, a robust nonparametric estimator has been suggested by Cazals, Florens, and Simar (2002, Journal of Econometrics 1, 1–25). In place of estimating the full frontier, they propose rather to estimate an expected frontier of order m. Similarly, we construct a new nonparametric estimator of the efficient frontier. It is based on conditional quantiles of an appropriate distribution associated with the production process. We show how these quantiles are interesting in efficiency analysis. We provide the statistical theory of the obtained estimators. We illustrate with some simulated examples and a frontier analysis of French post offices, showing the advantage of our estimators compared with the estimators of the expected maximal output frontiers of order m.We thank J.P. Florens for helpful discussions and C. Cazals for providing the post office data set. We also are very grateful to the referees for useful suggestions.

We consider asymmetric kernel density estimators and smoothed histograms when the unknown probability density function f is defined on [0,+∞). Uniform weak consistency on each compact set in [0,+∞) is proved for these estimators when f is continuous on its support. Weak convergence in L1 is also established. We further prove that the asymmetric kernel density estimator and the smoothed histogram converge in probability to infinity at x = 0 when the density is unbounded at x = 0. Monte Carlo results and an empirical study of the shape of a highly skewed income distribution based on a large microdata set are finally provided.We thank O. Linton and the three referees for constructive criticism and M.P. Feser and J. Litchfield for kindly providing the Brazilian data. We are grateful to I. Gijbels, J.M. Rolin, and I. Van Keilegom for their stimulating remarks and to participants at the workshop on statistical modeling (UCL 2002), LAMES (Sao Paulo 2002), L1 Norm conference (Neuchatel 2002), Geneva econometrics seminar, and KUL econometrics seminar for their comments. Part of this research was done when the second author was visiting THEMA and IRES. The first, resp. second, author gratefully acknowledges financial support from the “Projet d'Actions de Recherche Concertées” grant 98/03-217, and from the IAP research network grant P5/24 of the Belgian state, resp. the Swiss National Science Foundation through the National Centre of Competence in Research: Financial Valuation and Risk Management (NCCR-FINRISK).

This paper establishes various results involving functions of integrated processes. Two theorems—which improve similar results by Park and Phillips—are proved for averages of functions of an integrated process that has not been rescaled by the square root of sample size. In addition, two results are given that characterize asymptotic behavior of averages of nonintegrable functions of rescaled integrated processes; the observations close to the pole take over asymptotic behavior in that case. Throughout, we make the assumption that the innovations of the integrated process are a linear process.

We consider the Gaussian ARFIMA(j,d,l) model, with spectral density and an unknown mean . For this class of models, the n−1-normalized information matrix of the full parameter vector, (μ,θ), is asymptotically degenerate. To estimate θ, Dahlhaus (1989, Annals of Statistics 17, 1749–1766) suggested using the maximizer of the plug-in log-likelihood, , where is any n(1−2d)/2-consistent estimator of μ. The resulting estimator is a plug-in maximum likelihood estimator (PMLE). This estimator is asymptotically normal, efficient, and consistent, but in finite samples it has some serious drawbacks. Primarily, none of the Bartlett identities associated with are satisfied for fixed n. Cheung and Diebold (1994, Journal of Econometrics 62, 301–316) conducted a Monte Carlo simulation study and reported that the bias of the PMLE is about 3–4 times the bias of the regular maximum likelihood estimator (MLE). In this paper, we derive asymptotic expansions for the PMLE and show that its second-order bias is contaminated by an additional term, which does not exist in regular cases. This term arises because of the failure of the first Bartlett identity to hold and seems to explain Cheung and Diebold's simulated results. We derive similar expansions for the Whittle MLE, which is another estimator tacitly using the plug-in principle. An application to the ARFIMA(0,d,0) shows that the additional bias terms are considerable.Research on this topic commenced during 2000–2002, while the author was visiting the Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics at Yale University. The author is most grateful to the Cowles Foundation for their generous hospitality and to Donald Andrews and Peter Phillips for numerous helpful comments.

This paper generalizes the intuition of Hausman and Taylor (1981, Econometrica 49, 1377–1398) and develops a method of dealing with a time-invariant regressor in nonlinear panel models with fixed effects. We illustrate the usefulness of our result by discussing the implication for some nonlinear models of social interactions.We are grateful to Dan Ackerberg and Jerry Hausman for helpful comments. The first author gratefully acknowledges financial support from NSF grant SES-0313651.

In the statistics literature, asymptotic properties of the Maximum Product of Spacings estimator are derived from first principles. We propose an alternative derivation based on the comparison between its objective function and that of the Maximum Likelihood estimator.We thank the co-editor Paolo Paruolo for his patience and an anonymous referee for providing references to the statistics literature.

Let x be a random variable whose first three moments exist. If the density of x is unimodal and positively skewed, then counterexamples are provided which show that the inequality mode ≤ median ≤ mean does not necessarily hold.I thank Andrey Vasnev for help with the graphs and Jan Magnus for various helpful discussions. I also thank Martin Bland, Paolo Paruolo, Peter Phillips, Michael Rockinger, and a referee for their comments. ESRC grant R000239538 is gratefully acknowledged.

(a) Let , where Q is the fixed effects (FE) transformation given by Q = INT − P with P = IN [otimes ] ιTιT′/T.

This solution offers additional insights into the theory of block-tridiagonal Toeplitz matrices. Block Toeplitz matrices have constant blocks on each block diagonal parallel to the block main diagonal. A block partitioned matrix is said to be block-tridiagonal if the nonzero blocks occur only on the block subdiagonal, the block main diagonal, and the block superdiagonal. Block-tridiagonal Toeplitz matrices are particularly nice in that they are inexpensive to investigate. Our first observation on such particular block Toeplitz matrices is easy to check, and its proof is therefore left to the reader.

Let P in be a projector with PH its conjugate transpose.

I am delighted to announce the following Econometric Theory Awards for 2005.