American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Vol. 66, No. 2, May 1984

The Fourier Flexible Form

A. Ronald Gallant

One perspective on the recent work in flexible functional forms is that the use of such forms represents an attempt to remove the model-induced augmenting hypothesis that is inevitably linked to parametric statistical inference. The Fourier flexible form is discussed from this perspective. The discussion relies on heuristic and graphical arguments rather than formal mathematics.