As noted in the OECD's PISA 2000 Technical Report (OECD, 2002), the Austrian sample for the PISA 2000 assessment did not adequately cover students enrolled in combined school and work-based vocational programmes as required by the OECD's technical standards for PISA. The purpose of this working...

Abstract Equity basket correlation can be estimated both using the physical measure from stock prices, and also using the risk neutral measure from option prices. The difference between the two estimates motivates a so-called “dispersion strategy”. We study the performance of this strategy...

Abstract There is an increasing demand for models of multivariate time-series with time-varying and non-Gaussian dependencies. The available models suffer from the curse of dimensionality or from restrictive assumptions on the parameters and distributions. A promising class of models is that of...

This study considers the theoretical bootstrap “coupling” techniques for nonparametric robust smoothers and quantile regression, and we verify the bootstrap improvement. To handle the curse of dimensionality, a variant of “coupling” bootstrap techniques is developed for additive models...

Weather derivatives (WD) are end-products of a process known as securitization that transforms non-tradable risk factors (weather) into tradable financial assets. For pricing and hedging non-tradable assets, one essentially needs to incorporate the market price of risk (MPR), which is an...

Values of tranche spreads of collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) are driven by the joint default performance of the assets in the collateral pool. The dependence between the entities in the portfolio mainly depends on current economic conditions. Therefore, a correlation implied from tranches...

We consider a difference based ridge regression estimator and a Liu type estimator of the regression parameters in the partial linear semiparametric regression model, y=Xβ+f+ε. Both estimators are analyzed and compared in the sense of mean-squared error. We consider the case of independent...

We model the dynamics of ask and bid curves in a limit order book market using a dynamic semiparametric factor model. The shape of the curves is captured by a factor structure which is estimated nonparametrically. Corresponding factor loadings are modelled jointly with best bid and best ask...