We investigate the impact of monetary conditions on stock market returns at different points on the return distributions. Our results reveal no association between stock returns and monetary environments at the lower quantiles. At the upper quantiles, however, we find that expansive monetary...

Based on a modified version of the model used in Corvoisier and Gropp (2002) and De Guevara et al. (2005), we argue that banks' soundness, the structural characteristics and efficiency of the banking sector along with the development of the capital markets constitute a financial nexus. For a...

“Constant proportion portfolio insurance” is a popular technique among portfolio insurance strategies: the risky part of a portfolio is reallocated with respect to market conditions, via a fixed parameter (the multiple), guaranteeing a predetermined floor. We propose here to use a...

This paper examines change in wage gaps in urban China from 1988 to 2008 by estimating quantile regressions on CHIPS data. It applies the Machado and Mata (2005) decomposition, finding sharp increases in inequality largely due to changes in the wage structure. During 2002–08, changes in the...

Finding a tube of small width that covers a certain percentage of the training data samples is a robust way to estimate a location: the values of the data samples falling outside the tube have no direct influence on the estimate. The well-known ν-tube Support Vector Regression (ν-SVR) is an...

We examine the impact of Axis II personality disorders (PDs) on body weight. PDs are psychiatric conditions that develop early in life from a mixture of genetics and environment, are persistent, and lead to substantial dysfunction for the affected individual. The defining characteristics of PDs...