Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-statistics-course-of-the-university-of-oxford/2021/1/a/iii/solution

Write , with the natural logarithm. The likelihood function and log-likelihood function are
The score function is and the second derivative is . Thus the log-likelihood function is strictly concave, its stationary point is the unique global maximum, and the maximum-likelihood estimator is
The one-observation Fisher information is . The support of a probability distribution here is independent of , so the regular asymptotic normality of a maximum likelihood estimator gives
There is also a direct check: has an exponential distribution with rate , since for . Its mean and variance are and . Apply the central limit theorem to and the delta method to to obtain the same result.

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