Guest Editors’ Introduction: Model Selection and Evaluation in Econometrics

The 13th (EC) meeting was held at the University of Bologna, 13–14 December 2002, with the theme Model Selection and Evaluation. This collection of papers originates from that conference. (EC) is an acronym for European Conference of the Econom(etr)ics Community, focusing on Econometrics and Quantitative Economics. The programme chair for this meeting was Niels Haldrup with Herman K. van Dijk acting as co-chairman and with Renzo Orsi as the local organizer. The series of (EC) conferences was established in 1990, and each is organized about a particular theme, taking place over 2 days. Originally the conferences were intended to be relatively small in scale with no parallel sessions. To give as many participants as possible a chance to present their work, two poster sessions are also included. Given the success of the meetings, there has been an increasing number of participants at the conferences. In Bologna, there were almost 150 registered participants, and because of the growing interest in (EC) meetings it has become necessary to turn down more papers for presentation than we would like. Although around 130 papers were submitted for presentation, only 14 contributing (plus four invited) papers were presented in the plenary programme, with 35 papers in poster sessions. Over the years the popularity of the meetings has also attracted many more participants from outside Europe. At the 2002 Bologna meeting, there were participants from 20 countries, enhancing our forum for European researchers in ‘Quantitative Economics and Econometrics’. The conference series also sought to provide a forum where junior participants and senior invited presenters could meet and discuss their research, and the meetings have proved very successful in this respect. In Bologna, five of the 18 papers in the plenary programme were presented by younger researchers who were also well represented in the poster sessions. This Bulletin special issue is on the same theme as the 2002 conference, namely Model Selection and Evaluation and includes 11 papers from the conference: merely page constraints precluded a larger selection of the papers from the conference. The papers reported here, after rigorous reviewing and OXFORD BULLETIN OF ECONOMICS AND STATISTICS, 65, SUPPLEMENT (2003) 0305-9049