How can a single player defend against the threat of a coordinated attack by a group? For example, how can a central bank defend a currency peg against speculators, a government against a revolution or a prison warden against a breakout? Bentham (1787) proposed an innovative prison concept based...

Testing the validity of Value-at-Risk (VaR) forecasts, or backtesting, is an integral part of modern market risk management and regulation. This is often done by applying independence and coverage tests developed in Christoffersen (1998) to so-called hit-sequences derived from VaR forecasts and...

The demographic and epidemiological literature offers abundant examples of a range of shortcomings of statistical modeling to describe mortality by sex, age, time/cohort, and cause-of-death. Statistical modeling of mortality operating with implicitly homogenous sub-groupings exposed to mortality...

Consistency and asymptotic normality are established for the maximum likelihood estimators in the nonstationary ARCH and GARCH models with general t-distributed innovations. The results hold for joint estimation of (G)ARCH effects and the degrees of freedom parameter parametrizing the...

We study the stability of the estimated statistical relation of global mean temperature and global mean sea-level with regard to data revisions. Using three different model specifications proposed in the literature, we compare coefficient estimates and forecasts using two different vintages of...

The framework presented in this paper takes its cue from recent financial events and attempts to develop a tractable framework for policy analysis of macro-linkages, in particular a first attempt at the integration of an independent profit-maximising banking sector that lends to and borrows from...

There are simple well-known conditions for the validity of regression and correlation as statistical tools. We analyse by examples the effect of nonstationarity on inference using these methods and compare them to model based inference. Finally we analyse some data on annual mean temperature and...

We present a new type of field experiment to investigate ethnic prejudice in the workplace. Our design allows us to study how potential discriminators respond to changes in the cost of discrimination. We find that ethnic discrimination is common but remarkably responsive to the "price of...

The answer is no. Although naive intuition may suggest the opposite, uncertainty about costs in the homogeneous-good Bertrand model intensifies competition: it lowers price and raises total surplus (but also makes profits go up). For some economic environments, this is implied by Hansen's (RAND,...

We develop a measure of the timing of industrialization, comparable across 149 countries. Defining the year of industrial transition as the year in which employment in industry exceeded that in agriculture, we identify 67 countries that industrialized between 1801 and 2005 and 82 countries that...