Volume 36 of Advances in Econometrics recognizes Aman Ullah's significant contributions in many areas of econometrics and celebrates his long productive career. The volume features original papers on the theory and practice of econometrics that is related to the work of Aman Ullah. Topics include nonparametric/semiparametric econometrics; finite sample econometrics; shrinkage methods; information/entropy econometrics; model specification testing; robust inference; panel/spatial models. Advances in Econometrics is a research annual whose editorial policy is to publish original research articles that contain enough details so that economists and econometricians who are not experts in the topics will find them accessible and useful in their research.

The Regression Discontinuity (RD) design is one of the most popular and credible research designs for program evaluation and causal inference. This volume 38 of Advances in Econometrics collects twelve innovative and thought-provoking contributions to the RD literature, covering a wide range of methodological and practical topics. Some chapters touch on foundational methodological issues such as identification, interpretation, implementation, falsification testing, estimation and inference, while others focus on more recent and related topics such as identification and interpretation in a discontinuity-in-density framework, empirical structural estimation, comparative RD methods, and extrapolation. These chapters not only give new insights for current methodological and empirical research, but also provide new bases and frameworks for future work in this area. This volume contributes to the rapidly expanding RD literature by bringing together theoretical and applied econometricians, statisticians, and social, behavioural and biomedical scientists, in the hope that these interactions will further spark innovative practical developments in this important and active research area.

Dynamic factor models (DFM) constitute an active and growing area of research, both in econometrics, in macroeconomics, and in finance. Many applications lie at the center of policy questions raised by the recent financial crises, such as the connections between yields on government debt, credit risk, inflation, and economic growth. This volume collects a key selection of up-to-date contributions that cover a wide range of issues in the context of dynamic factor modeling, such as specification, estimation, and application of DFMs. Examples include further developments in DFM for mixed-frequency data settings, extensions to time-varying parameters and structural breaks, for multi-level factors associated with subsets of variables, in factor augmented error correction models, and in many other related aspects. A number of contributions propose new estimation procedures for DFM, such as spectral expectation-maximization algorithms and Bayesian approaches. Numerous applications are discussed, including the dating of business cycles, implied volatility surfaces, professional forecaster survey data, and many more.