This paper derives explicit expressions for the asymptotic variances of the maximum likelihood and continuously updated GMM estimators under potentially misspecified models. The proposed misspecification-robust variance estimators allow the researcher to conduct valid inference on the model parameters even when the model is rejected by the data. Although the results for the maximum likelihood e...

This paper contributes to the existing literature by examining the determinants of health financing in 177 developed and developing countries. The study introduces the variables of government effectiveness and control of corruption to capture the impact of governance quality on different mechanisms of health financing. Utilizing panel data analysis, namely system-GMM estimators, to obtain unbia...

This paper measures the productivity impact of shop-floor employee involvement. On the basis of a representative German establishment data set, the study finds that the introduction of team-work and autonomous work groups, and a reduction of hierarchies in 1996/97 significantly increased average establishment productivity in 1997 – 2000. The estimation strategy controls for unobserved invariant...

This papers studies and compares the asymptotic bias of GMM and generalized empirical likelihood (GEL) estimators in the presence of estimated nuisance parameters. We consider cases in which the nuisance parameter is estimated from independent and identical samples. A simulation experiment is conducted for covariance structure models. Empirical likelihood offers much reduced mean and median bia...

Variability in speech due to dialect is a major factor limiting speech system performance for speech recognition, spoken document retrieval, and dialog systems. In this study, we propose a novel discriminative algorithm to improve dialect classification for unsupervised spontaneous speech in Arabic. No transcripts are used for either training or testing, and all data are spontaneous speech. The...

in recent years, economists have paid attention to the relationship between emotions and productivity. economists investigated the bi-directional effect of emotion and subjective well-being, such as happiness, on different economic variables, such as productivity, health, income, and so on. in this paper, we try to study the effect of income on labour force happiness in iran. for this purpose, ...

Using many moment conditions can improve efficiency but makes the usual GMM inferences inaccurate. Two step GMM is biased. Generalized empirical likelihood (GEL) has smaller bias but the usual standard errors are too small in instrumental variable settings. In this paper we give a new variance estimator for GEL that addresses this problem. It is consistent under the usual asymptotics and under ...

This paper presents a novel automatic speaker age and gender identification approach which combines five different methods at the acoustic level to improve the baseline performance. The five subsystems are (1) Gaussian mixture model (GMM) system based on mel-frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC) features, (2) Support vector machine (SVM) based on GMM mean supervectors, (3) SVM based on GMM maxi...

in this paper, the effect of trade openness on growth is examined across the members of organization of the islamic conference (oic) by using convergence-growth equation and gmm-system dynamic panel data estimator over the period 1980-2009. the results show that the overall trade, the trade with non-oic countries, and the investment in physical and human capital stimulate economic growth. in co...