Behavioural influences in Portuguese foreign direct investment

The paper presents a behavioural economics approach to FDI. It relies on questionnaires and interviews with Portuguese managers to present evidence of the role played by herding, anchoring, mental accounting and other behavioural rules in FDI location decisions. It originates a set of heuristics influencing the direction of FDI flows and it confirms the prediction of the Heiner, 1983, Heiner, 1989 that the higher the uncertainty faced by decision makers the more frequent will be the use of behavioural rules. The results go beyond neoclassical theory by helping to explain non-maximizing decision-making by managers.     

General m-esttmators and applications to bounded influence estimation for non-linear regression

In this paper, we study the M-estimators in the case that λ_F:(β)=E_F:(φ(Z,β))=0 has more than one solution, We show that the numerical iterative procedures converge and that the resulting estimators are consistent and asymptotically normal. We apply them to the non-linear regression models, and then, we find an optimal M-estimate among those that have bounded gross error sensitivity.     

Empirical likelihood tests for two‐sample problems via nonparametric density estimation

The authors study the problem of testing whether two populations have the same law by comparing kernel estimators of the two density functions. The proposed test statistic is based on a local empirical likelihood approach. They obtain the asymptotic distribution of the test statistic and propose a bootstrap approximation to calibrate the test. A simulation study is carried out in which the proposed method is compared with two competitors, and a procedure to select the bandwidth parameter is studied. The proposed test can be extended to more than two samples and to multivariate distributions.