Crop insurance is a viable solution to reduce the vulnerability of smallholder farmers to risks from pest and disease outbreaks, extreme weather events, and market shocks that threaten their household food and income security. In developing and emerging countries, the implementation of area yield-based insurance, the form of crop insurance preferred by clients and industry, is constrained by th...

Abstract: In this work, consistent estimators and simultaneous confidence bands for the derivatives of mean functions are proposed when curves are repeatedly recorded for each subject. The within-curve correlation of trajectories has been considered while the proposed novel confidence bands still enjoys semiparametric efficiency. The proposed methods lead to a straightforward extension of the t...

Outliers and influential observations can have an important effect on work with estimation and inference from establishment survey data. Practical development and implementation of methods to identify and account for outliers and influential observations in complex survey data require an agency to balance several factors, including: (i) the mathematical statistics properties of detection method...

Despite the popularity of prediction markets among economists, businesses and policymakers have been slow to adopt them in decision making. Most studies of prediction markets outside the lab are from public markets with large trading populations. Corporate prediction markets face additional issues, such as thinness, weak incentives, limited entry and the potential for traders with biases or ult...

This study assesses the effect of population change on decade changes in the educational attainments of country of origin populations in the United States. Our data are derived from decennial censuses, NLMS, the World Bank, and INS. We find that changes in the share of country of origin populations with one or more years of post-secondary schooling are associated with selected components of pop...

In this communication, sample measures of kurtosis adapted by various software packages are compared for data from normal and non-normal populations. Further, two improved estimators of population kurtosis are proposed and their performance is compared with the currently used measures. The suggested estimators have considerably lower mean squared error (MSE) for various sampling designs in our ...

[1] One of the primary goals of the Center for Integrated Space Weather Modeling (CISM) effort is to assess and improve prediction of the solar wind conditions in nearEarth space, arising from both quasi-steady and transient structures. We compare 8 years of L1 in situ observations to predictions of the solar wind speed made by the WangSheeley-Arge (WSA) empirical model. The mean-square error (...

The authors propose a robust semi-parametric empirical likelihood method to integrate all available information from multiple samples with a common center of measurements. Two different sets of estimating equations are used to improve the classical likelihood inference on the measurement center. The proposed method does not require the knowledge of the functional forms of the probability densit...

Stephanodiscus niagarae populations in a core from Lake Ontario show systematic variation in radial puncta number and mean valve diameter. Puncta number is stable in specimens from samples deposited between 1720 and 1844. Puncta number gradually increases in samples deposited between 1860 and 1947, then increases rapidly to high numbers in samples deposited after 1964. Mean valve diameter is re...