The fields of probability and statistics are built over the abstract concepts of probability space and random variable. This has given rise to elegant and powerful mathematical theory, but exact implementation of these concepts on conventional computers seems impossible. In practice, random...

A user friendly approach to modeling the risk process is presented. It utilizes the insurance library of the XploRe computing environment which is accompanied by on-line, hyperlinked and freely downloadable from the web manuals and e-books. The empirical analysis for Danish fire losses for the...

This paper shows that open market block trading can provide a link between private benefits of control enjoyed by large shareholders and the ?voting premium?, i.e. the price difference between voting and non-voting shares. We first demonstrate in a microstructure model with informed traders and...

It is not an overstatement to say that statistics is based on various transformations of data. Basic statistical summaries such as the sample mean, variance, z-scores, histograms, etc., are all transformed data. Some more advanced summaries, such as principal components, periodograms, empirical...

In this paper we investigate the profitability of ?skewness trades? and ?kurtosis trades? based on comparisons of implied state price densities versus historical densities. In particular, we examine the ability of SPD comparisons to detect structural breaks in the options market behaviour. While...

We make three contributions to using the variance ratio statistic at large horizons. Allowing for general heteroscedasticity in the data, we obtain the asymptotic distribution of the statistic when the horizon k is increasing with the sample size n but at a slower rate so that k=n ! 0. The test...

Empirical research on the gravity model of international trade in the wake of Rose (2000) affirms that currency union formation doubles or triples trade. However, currency unions could also be established precisely because trade among their members was already high. In OLS estimation, this would...

Given a probability density f on R^d, the minimum volume set of probability content á can be estimated by the level set of the same probability content corresponding to a kernel estimator of f. We obtain convergence rates for this plug-in estimator with respect to a measure-based distance...

Since the seminal paper by Dickey and Fuller in 1979, unit-root tests have conditioned the standard approaches to analyse time series with strong serial dependence, the focus being placed in the detection of eventual unit roots in an autorregresive model fitted to the series. In this paper we...