Statistical Method Selection Matters: Vanilla Methods in Regression May Yield Misleading Results

The primary aim of this work is to illustrate the importance of the choice of the appropriate methods for the statistical analysis of economic data. Typically, there exist several alternative versions of common statistical methods for every statistical modeling task and the most habitually used ("vanilla") versions may yield rather misleading results in non-standard situations. Linear regression is considered here as the most fundamental econometric model. First, the analysis of a world tourism dataset is presented, where the number of international arrivals is modeled for 140 countries of the world as a response of 14 pillars (indicators) of the Travel and Tourism Competitiveness Index. Heteroscedasticity is clearly recognized in the dataset. However, the Aitken estimator, which would be the standard remedy in such a situation, is revealed here to be very inappropriate; regression quantiles represent a much more suitable solution here. The second illustration with artificial data reveals standard regression quantiles to be unsuitable for data contaminated by outlying values; their recently proposed robust version turns out to be much more appropriate. Both illustrations reveal that choosing suitable methods represent an important (and often difficult) part of the analysis of economic data.