The frequency of crashes and the magnitude of crises in international financial markets are growing more severe over time. Recent financial crises are not singular events portrayed in recent accounts, rather, they erupt in circumstances that are very similar to the economic and financial...

We consider the relative merits of various saddlepoint approximations for the c.d.f. of a statistic with a possibly non-normal limit distribution. In addition to the usual Lugannani-Rice approximation we also consider approximations based on higher-order expansions, including the case where the...

We derive saddlepoint approximations for the density and distribution functions of the half-life estimated by OLS from an AR(1) or AR(p) model. Our analytic results are used to prove that none of the integer-order moments of these half-life estimators exist. This provides an explanation for the...

We analyze several measures of volatility (realized variance, bipower variation and squared daily returns) as estimators of integrated variance of a continuous time stochastic process for an asset price. We use a Multiplicative Error Model to describe the evolution of each measure as the product...

The transmission mechanisms of volatility between markets can be characterized within a new Markov Switching bivariate model where the state of one variable feeds into the transition probability of the state of the other. A number of model restrictions and hypotheses can be tested to stress the...

The Multiplicative Error Model introduced by Engle (2002) for non-negative valued processes is specified as the product of a (conditionally autoregressive) scale factor and an innovation process with positive support. In this paper we propose a multivariate extension of such a model, by taking...

This paper assesses the performance of volatility forecasting using focused selection and combination strategies to include relevant explanatory variables in the forecasting model. The focused selection/combination strategies consist of picking up the model that minimizes the estimated risk...

In this paper we use extreme value theory to model the U.S. movie box-office returns, using weekly data for the period January 1982 to September 2006. The Peaks over Threshold method is used to fit the Generalized Pareto Distribution to the tails of the distributions of both positive weekly...

We consider estimating the linear regression model’s coefficients when there is uncertainty about coefficient restrictions. Theorems establish that the mean squared errors of combination estimators, formed as weighted averages of the ordinary least squares and one or more restricted least...

We model the length of time that it takes for a patent application to be granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, conditional on the patent actually being awarded eventually. Survival analysis is applied and both the nonparametric Kaplan-Meier and parametric accelerated failure time...