I use numerical methods to test for the presence of one-time structural breaks in the conditional variance of nominal interest rate spreads in four European countries over a period of eleven years (Jan 1988 to Dec 1998). I start with an intuitive approach consisting of a sequence of breakpoint...

Using one of the key property of copulas that they remain invariant under an arbitrary monotonous change of variable, we investigate the null hypothesis that the dependence between financial assets can be modeled by the Gaussian copula. We find that most pairs of currencies and pairs of major...

The standard confidence regions based on the first-order approximation of quantile regression estimators can be inaccurate in small samples. We show that confidence regions based on the smoothed empirical likelihood ratio have coverage errors of order n^{-1} and may be Bartlett-corrected to...

This paper brings together a number of new specification search strategies in spatial econometric modeling. In the literature, experimental results for several forward stepwise strategies aimed at remedying spatial dependence, have been reported. Essentially, these strategies boil down to the...

Testing for unit roots in short-term interest rates plays a key role in the empirical modelling of these series. It is widely assumed that the volatility of interest rates follows some time-varying function which is dependent of the level of the series. This may cause distortions in the...

In recent years two classes of switching models have been proposed, the Markov switching models, Hamilton (1989) and the Threshold Auto- Regressive Models (TAR), Lim and Tong (1980). These two models have the advantage of being able to modelize and capture asymmetry, sudden changes and...

This paper develops a simple sequential multiple horizon non-causation test strategy for trivariate VAR models (with one auxiliary variable). We apply the test strategy to a rolling window study of money supply and real income, with the price of oil, the unemployment rate and the spread between...

This paper introduces a new method for evaluating a trading system based on its past performance. The method is a hypothesis test that asks whether the system is making random trades. The test controls for price behavior during the test period and the trade characteristics of the system being...

This paper seeks whether the intraday patterns observed in most stock markets hold for an individual stock from the Istanbul Stock Exchange where the trading ceases for two hours during lunchtime. It investigates the most treated topics in market finance like liquidity, returns and volatility...

This paper investigates the testable restrictions on the time-series behavior of equity premia implied by a representative agent model whose state- and time-non separable preferences are subject to taste shocks. The model nests state- and time-separable preferences with and without taste shocks...