This paper estimates returns to education in India using a nationally representative survey. We estimate the standard Mincerian wage equation separately for rural and urban sectors. To account for the possibility of sample selection bias, Heckman two-step procedure is used. The findings indicate that returns to education increase with the level of education and differ for rural and urban reside...

For noninformative nonparametric estimation of finite population quantiles under simple random sampling, estimation based on the Polya posterior is similar to estimation based on the Bayesian approach developed by Ericson (1969, JRSSB, 31, 195-233) in that the Polya posterior distribution is the limit of Ericson’s posterior distributions as the weight placed on the prior distribution diminishes...

The paper considers two general ways dependent groups might be compared based on quantiles. The first compares the quantiles of the marginal distributions. The second focuses on the lower and upper quantiles of the usual difference scores. Methods for comparing quantiles have been derived that typically assume sampling is from a continuous distribution. There are exceptions, but generally, when...

Statistical volatility models rely on the assumption that the shape of the conditional distribution is fixed over time and that it is only the volatility that varies. The recently proposed conditional autoregressive value at risk (CAViaR) models require no such assumption, and allow quantiles to be modelled directly in an autoregressive framework. Although useful for risk management, CAViaR mod...

Many real-world applications require management of uncertain data that are modeled as objects in high-dimensional space with imprecise values. In such applications, data objects are typically associated with probability density functions. A fundamental operation on such uncertain data is the probabilistic-threshold range query (PTRQ), which retrieves the objects appearing in the query region wi...