Encompassing

Abstract

With the kind permission of the Editors of the Oxford Bulletin, this Special Issue onEncompassing is a volume in honour of Grayham E. Mizon, to celebrate his majorcontributions to econometrics, and in particular, to the development of the theory ofencompassing and testing non-nested hypotheses. Grayham’s publications on encom-passing by himself, and with various co-authors (including most contributors to thisSpecial Issue), have been cited more than 800 times, reflecting its widespread useacross a diverse range of empirical and theoretical studies.Grayham has advanced numerous other areas in econometrics, including modelselection and progressive research strategies, panel data and time-series analyses,simulation and Monte Carlo methods, forecast evaluation and economic policy anal-ysis, and exogeneity, as well as encompassing. In addition to the formulation andimplementation of new estimators and test statistics, he has contributed to the sub-stantive application of new econometric tools, developing empirical models andpolicy analyses for both developed and transition economies, investigating consump-tion, employment and output, wage and price inflation, and relative prices. A partialbibliography is provided below.Grayham was also a prolific ‘producer’ of doctoral students – several of whomhave contributed to this Special Issue – as well as a constructive referee and editor,both for specific projects and in general for the highly successful Advanced Texts inEconometrics, which he overviewed with Clive W.J. Granger on behalf of OxfordUniversity Press.We are delighted to have been able to collect together a set of papers whichfurther advance the coverage of encompassing, by investigating the principles ofencompassing; encompassing as a key part of a general empirical methodology;its role in both automatic and human-driven model selection; hypothesis testingfor linear and nonlinear, nested and non-nested, parametric and non-parametricmodels; as well as simulation, forecast, cross-data vintage, and Bayesianencompassing.Until he reads this Foreword, Grayham will have been unaware of this purposeof our Special Issue, despite being the main Guest Editor, and co-author of two ofthe papers. We are grateful to all the contributors for sustaining our secret, and hopeit is a pleasant surprise for Grayham. Most authors and co-authors have been able to offer their own felicitations toGrayham in another paper – one which was not written with him – except for ChiaraMonfardini, who therefore joins the two other Guest Editors in congratulating Gray-ham on a truly fecund career, and wishing him continuing success in unravelling thetheory and practice of econometrics.