YEAR

2026

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Environmental Economics , Theory

Dynamic Pesticide Regulation under Resistance and Fiscal Constraints

Pesticide use generates dynamic externalities through resistance, health, and environmental channels, complicating the design of optimal regulation. We develop a dynamic framework in which pesticide use, resistance, and damages are jointly determined under a balanced-budget constraint. Resistance affects policy through two margins: it raises marginal external damages by amplifying effective exposure, but also reduces pesticide use, shrinking the fiscal base for intervention. This interaction creates a state-dependent gap between the Pigouvian benchmark and the constrained-efficient policy, which we term fiscal attenuation. We characterize the optimal tax-subsidy system and show that resistance both strengthens the case for taxation and shifts implementation toward non-chemical control. Simulations quantify the nonlinear interaction between resistance dynamics and fiscal capacity, highlighting the joint role of evolving damages and fiscal constraints in optimal environmental poli

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Statistics , Data Analytics

Enhanced Lepage-type test statistics for location-scale shifts with right-skewed data

Detecting simultaneous shifts in location and scale between two populations is a common challenge in statistical inference, particularly in fields like biomedicine where right-skewed data distributions are prevalent. The classical Lepage test, which combines the Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney and Ansari-Bradley tests, can be suboptimal under these conditions due to its restrictive assumptions of equal variances and medians. This study systematically evaluates enhanced Lepage-type test statistics that incorporate modern robust components for improved performance with right-skewed data. We combine the Fligner-Policello test and Fong-Huang variance estimator for the location component with a novel empirical variance estimator for the Ansari-Bradley scale component, relaxing assumptions of equal variances and medians. Extensive Monte Carlo simulations across exponential, gamma, chi-square, lognormal, and Weibull distributions demonstrate that tests incorporating both robust components achieve power

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Statistics , Data Analytics

The α–regression for compositional data: a unified framework for standard, spatially-lagged, spatial autoregressive and geographically-weighted regression models

Compositional data–vectors of non-negative components summing to unity–frequently arise in scientific applications where covariates influence the relative proportions of components, yet traditional regression approaches face challenges regarding the unit-sum constraint and zero values. This paper revisits the α–regression framework, which uses a flexible power transformation parameterized by α to interpolate between raw data analysis and log-ratio methods, naturally handling zeros without imputation while allowing data-driven transformation selection. We formulate α–regression as a non-linear least squares problem, study its asymptotic properties, provide efficient estimation via the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm, and derive marginal effects for interpretation.

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Statistics , Data Analytics

Scalable approximation of the transformation-free linear simplicial-simplicial regression via constrained iterative reweighted least squares

Simplicia-simplicial regression concerns statistical modeling scenarios in which both the predictors and the responses are vectors constrained to lie on the simplex. Fiksel et al. (2022) introduced a transformationfree linear regression framework for this setting, wherein the regression coefficients are estimated by minimizing the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the observed and fitted compositions, using an expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm for optimization. In this work, we reformulate the problem as a constrained logistic regression model, in line with the methodological perspective of Tsagris (2025), and we obtain parameter estimates via constrained iteratively reweighted least squares. Simulation results indicate that the proposed procedure substantially improves computational efficiency-yielding speed gains ranging from 6×−−326×-while providing estimates that closely approximate those obtained from the EM-based approach.

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