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Shortly after the tragedy that we now know as '9-11', Bryce Ross flew across the country to bare witness to his aunt's last will and testament. The choices he made, as well as the resulting events that followed, changed his life and our futures forever.

His determination to expose questionable facts and circumstances involving the Kennedy Assassination provided him with the motivation to adhere to the passionate and obsessive terms of a substantially funded trust that was created by his late uncle.

Freedom is a choice that we all take for granted. A government of the people is what fosters our liberties and protects them from coming under the control of others. Bryce considers whether wealth should be allowed to continue its dominance over our trusted and elected officials when the pressure reveals itself to be life-threatening."

This Volume of "Advances in Econometrics" contains a selection of papers presented initially at the 7th Annual Advances in Econometrics Conference held on the LSU campus in Baton Rouge, Louisiana during November 14-16, 2008. The theme of the conference was 'Nonparametric Econometric Methods', and the papers selected for inclusion in this Volume span a range of nonparametric techniques including kernel smoothing, empirical copulas, series estimators, and smoothing splines along with a variety of semiparametric methods. The papers in this Volume cover topics of interest to those who wish to familiarize themselves with current nonparametric methodology. Many papers also identify areas deserving of future attention. There exist survey papers devoted to recent developments in nonparametric nance, constrained nonparametric regression, miparametric/nonparametric environmental econometrics and nonparametric models with non-stationary data. There exist theoretical papers dealing with novel approaches for partial identification of the distribution of treatment effects, xed effects semiparametric panel data models, functional coefficient models with time series data, exponential series estimators of empirical copulas, estimation of multivariate CDFs and bias-reduction methods for density estimation. There also exist a number of applications that analyze returns to education, the evolution of income and life expectancy, the role of governance in growth, farm production, city size and unemployment rates, derivative pricing, and environmental pollution and economic growth. In short, this Volume contains a range of theoretical developments, surveys, and applications that would be of interest to those who wish to keep abreast of some of the most important current developments in the field of nonparametric estimation.

A century ago, Chinese organized criminals were involved symbiotically with the politics, economics, and social life of the Chinese-American community, infiltrated the larger American society, and victimized Chinese and non-Chinese alike. Remarkably, they did this in the face of difficult language and cultural barriers and rampant institutional racism. Organized crime in the Chinese-American community is a long-term historical phenomenon that can be attributed to fundamental contradictions in the society, politics, and economics that created opportunities for professional criminals of all backgrounds, often specifically for those of Chinese descent. For example, the illegal traffic of women, laborers, and opium were consequences of the anti-Chinese laws. Despite a hostile, racist climate, however, Chinese criminals were able to purchase protection and some semblance of economic and political equality from corrupt politicians, police officers, and bureaucrats. While other Chinese-Americans worked diligently and bravely to remove racist laws and regulations, Chinatown gangsters instead saw opportunity for profit and power. This study tests the conventional wisdom of academics, the media, and the government about Chinese organized crime against the historical record and seeks to establish whether it is emerging, nontraditional, or both, and whether it personifies a new international criminal threat to the United States. The analysis of the historical perspective of Chinese organized crime is augmented by detailed accounts of individual gangsters and events. The research is accumulated from contemporary histories and sociological treatments of New York's Chinatown and tong warfare, as well as from newspapers, reform pamphlets, travel guides, and municipal reports. There is a void in the history, criminology, ethnic studies, and sociological fields that this unique book will surely fill.

Cross-Cultural Psychology combines quantitative and qualitative research with anecdotal material to examine multicultural issues and capture the richness of diverse cultures in relation to psychology. This Canadian edition delivers first-person narrative accounts by people in Canada of all ages and cultural backgrounds to illustrate compelling topics such as communication, racial and cultural identity, development, racism, worldviews, and immigration within our national context and beyond.

Yelena Lanskaya directs this festive comedy starring James Cosmo and Ione Skye. While on his way to deliver the world's presents on Christmas Eve Santa (Cosmo)'s sleigh is shot down by American military agents for fear he is an imposter from outer space. As Santa is taken in to Homeland Security headquarters for questioning he has to try to convince the disbelievers of his existence in order to save Christmas.

""Nonparametric Econometrics" by Li and Racine is a must for any serious econometrician or statistician who is working on cutting-edge problems. The theoretical treatment of nonparametric methods is remarkably complete in its coverage of mainstream and relatively arcane topics. I particularly like Li and Racine's general treatment of continuous and discrete regressors and of specification testing, topics that I have not seen handled in such a comprehensive fashion. I will certainly use this in my graduate econometrics courses and in conducting my own research."--Robin Sickles, Rice University

"Very few studies have tried to apply the nonparametric techniques to analyze real data. The lack of applications of those techniques is perhaps attributable to the lack of a good textbook that explains intuitively how and why those techniques work. This book by Li and Racine serves both applied researchers and graduate students. It is written in plain language so that it can be understood by anyone with basic econometrics but zero knowledge of nonparametric methods. And it contains enough specifics that clearly spell out steps to implement those methods."--Chunrong Ai, University of Florida

"This book represents a very significant contribution to the field of econometrics. It provides an extremely thorough coverage of our knowledge in the area of nonparametric and semiparametric methods as they apply to economic models and economic data. And it makes accessible, for the first time, a body of relatively new material relating to discrete and 'mixed' data. There is a good balance of theoretical material and applications. Apart from serving as a superb teaching text in graduate-level courseswhere the students have a strong econometrics/statistics preparation, I believe this book will become a must-have reference resource for many researchers."--David E. Giles, University of Victoria

A comprehensive, up-to-date textbook on nonparametric methods for students and researchers Until now, students and researchers in nonparametric and semiparametric statistics and econometrics have had to turn to the latest journal articles to keep pace with these emerging methods of economic analysis. Nonparametric Econometrics fills a major gap by gathering together the most up-to-date theory and techniques and presenting them in a remarkably straightforward and accessible format. The empirical tests, data, and exercises included in this textbook help make it the ideal introduction for graduate students and an indispensable resource for researchers. Nonparametric and semiparametric methods have attracted a great deal of attention from statisticians in recent decades. While the majority of existing books on the subject operate from the presumption that the underlying data is strictly continuous in nature, more often than not social scientists deal with categorical data-nominal and ordinal-in applied settings. The conventional nonparametric approach to dealing with the presence of discrete variables is acknowledged to be unsatisfactory. This book is tailored to the needs of applied econometricians and social scientists. Qi Li and Jeffrey Racine emphasize nonparametric techniques suited to the rich array of data types-continuous, nominal, and ordinal-within one coherent framework. They also emphasize the properties of nonparametric estimators in the presence of potentially irrelevant variables. Nonparametric Econometrics covers all the material necessary to understand and apply nonparametric methods for real-world problems.