On 28th November OxTalks will move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events' (full details are available on the Staff Gateway).
There will be an OxTalks freeze beginning on Friday 14th November. This means you will need to publish any of your known events to OxTalks by then as there will be no facility to publish or edit events in that fortnight. During the freeze, all events will be migrated to the new Oxford Events site. It will still be possible to view events on OxTalks during this time.
If you have any questions, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
Testing for mediation effects is empirically important and theoretically interesting. It is empirically important in psychology, medicine, and marketing for instance, and leads to a theoretically interesting and long-standing problem in statistics that this paper solves. The no-mediation effect hypothesis, expressed as H₀:θ₁θ₂=0, defines a manifold that is non-regular in the origin where the size and power of standard tests, including the Wald, LR, and LM tests, are extremely low. The statistical challenge is to find a similar test with correct size independent of θ₁ and θ₂. We solve this problem by considering the critical region directly, rather than defining a test statistic and trying to correct its critical value. We prove the interesting theoretical result that no similar test exists, even if the asymptotic normal approximation is used. Despite this negative theoretical finding, we are able to construct a critical region that is all but similar and can be used in practice. We extend this result to three dimensions and show how it can be extended to higher dimensions for null hypotheses of the form H₀:θ₁θ₂⋯=0 with singularities in the origin.