Informal care has drawn much attention among scholars and policymakers as it concerns an essential but hard to evaluate resource of welfare. Albeit several studies addressed the monetary value of informal care, differences in the relationship between caregivers and recipients have often been...

Probability of default prediction is one of the important tasks of rating agencies as well as of banks and other financial companies to measure the default risk of their counterparties. Knowing predictors that significantly contribute to default prediction provides a better insight into...

We derive recursive representations of nonlinear moving average (NLMA) perturbations of DSGE models. As the stability of higher order NLMA representations follows directly from stability at first order, these recursive representations provide rigorous support for the practice of pruning that is...

A State Price Density (SPD) is the density function of a risk neutral equivalent martingale measure for option pricing, and is indispensible for exotic option pricing and portfolio risk management. Many approaches have been proposed in the last two decades to calibrate a SPD using financial...

Bank liability guarantee schemes have traditionally been viewed as costless measures to shore up investor confidence and stave off bank runs. However, as the experiences of some European countries, most notably Ireland, have demonstrated, the credibility and effectiveness of these guarantees is...

We show that performance-sensitive debt (PSD) is used to reduce hold-up problems in repeated lending relationships. Using a large sample of bank loans, we find a more frequent use of PSD if hold-up is more likely, e.g. if a longterm lending relationship exists and the borrower has fewer outside...

We consider estimation of the quadratic (co)variation of a semimartingale from discrete observations which are irregularly spaced under high-frequency asymptotics. In the univariate setting, results from Jacod (2008) are generalized to the case of irregular observations. In the two-dimensional...

We develop analysis of deviance tools for generalized partial linear models based on local polynomial fitting. Assuming a canonical link, we propose expressions for both local and global analysis of deviance, which admit an additivity property that reduces to ANOVA decompositions in the Gaussian...

In vector autoregressive analysis confidence intervals for individual impulse responses are typically reported to indicate the sampling uncertainty in the estimation results. A range of methods are reviewed and a new proposal is made for constructing joint confidence bands, given a prespecifed...

Although there is an increasing interest in index-based insurances in many developing countries, crop data scarcity hinders its implementation by forcing insurers to charge higher premiums. Expert knowledge has been considered a valuable information source to augment limited data in insurance...