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Data separation is a well-studied phenomenon that can cause problems in the estimation and inference from binary response models. Complete or quasi-complete separation occurs when there is a combination of regressors in the model whose value can perfectly predict one or both outcomes. In such cases, and such cases only, the maximum likelihood estimates and the corresponding standard errors are infinite. It is less widely known that the same can happen in further microeconometric models. One of the few works in the area is Santos Silva and Tenreyro (2010) who note that the finiteness of the maximum likelihood estimates in Poisson regression depends on the data configuration and propose a strategy to detect and overcome the consequences of data separation. However, their approach can lead to notable bias on the parameter estimates when the regressors are correlated. We illustrate how bias-reducing adjustments to the maximum likelihood score equations can overcome the consequences of separation in Poisson and Tobit regression models., Comment: 8 pages, 8 figures

Methods for detecting structural changes, or change points, in time series data are widely used in many fields of science and engineering. This chapter sketches some basic methods for the analysis of structural changes in time series data. The exposition is confined to retrospective methods for univariate time series. Several recent methods for dating structural changes are compared using a time series of oil prices spanning more than 60 years. The methods broadly agree for the first part of the series up to the mid-1980s, for which changes are associated with major historical events, but provide somewhat different solutions thereafter, reflecting a gradual increase in oil prices that is not well described by a step function. As a further illustration, 1990s data on the volatility of the Hang Seng stock market index are reanalyzed., Comment: 12 pages, 6 figures

The rootogram is a graphical tool associated with the work of J. W. Tukey that was originally used for assessing goodness of fit of univariate distributions. Here we extend the rootogram to regression models and show that this is particularly useful for diagnosing and treating issues such as overdispersion and/or excess zeros in count data models. We also introduce a weighted version of the rootogram that can be applied out of sample or to (weighted) subsets of the data, e.g., in finite mixture models. An empirical illustration revisiting a well-known data set from ethology is included, for which a negative binomial hurdle model is employed. Supplementary materials providing two further illustrations are available online: the first, using data from public health, employs a two-component finite mixture of negative binomial models, the second, using data from finance, involves underdispersion. An R implementation of our tools is available in the R package countreg. It also contains the data and replication code., Comment: 19 pages, 7 figures

The Benini distribution is a lognormal-like distribution generalizing the Pareto distribution. Like the Pareto and the lognormal distributions it was originally proposed for modeling economic size distributions, notably the size distribution of personal income. This paper explores a probabilistic property of the Benini distribution, showing that it is not determined by the sequence of its moments although all the moments are finite. It also provides explicit examples of distributions possessing the same set of moments. Related distributions are briefly explored., Comment: 10 pages, 1 figure

This paper studies a Stieltjes-type moment problem defined by the generalized lognormal distribution, a heavy-tailed distribution with applications in economics, finance and related fields. It arises as the distribution of the exponential of a random variable following a generalized error distribution, and hence figures prominently in the EGARCH model of asset price volatility. Compared to the classical lognormal distribution it has an additional shape parameter. It emerges that moment (in)determinacy depends on the value of this parameter: for some values, the distribution does not have finite moments of all orders, hence the moment problem is not of interest in these cases. For other values, the distribution has moments of all orders, yet it is moment-indeterminate. Finally, a limiting case is supported on a bounded interval, and hence determined by its moments. For those generalized lognormal distributions that are moment-indeterminate Stieltjes classes of moment-equivalent distributions are presented., Comment: 12 pages, 1 figure