In this paper, using the Monte Carlo (MC) method we propose an estimation and (at the same time) a test procedure for the stability parameter of a-stable distributions. One powerful advantage of the MC method is that it provides an exact significance level for finite samples, whose distribution...

Under the symmetric α-stable distributional assumption for the disturbances, Blattberg et al (1971) consider unbiased linear estimators for a regression model with non-stochastic regressors. We consider both the rate of convergence to the true value and the asymptotic distribution of the...

Since Mandelbrot's seminal work (1963), alpha-stable distributions with infinite variance have been regarded as a more realistic distributional assumption than the normal distribution for some economic variables, especially financial data. After providing a brief survey of theoretical results on...

In this paper, we review the German practice of imputing the costs of owner-occupied housing by increasing the relative weight of actual rents in the CPI. As the structure of owner-occupied housing differs substantially from that of rental housing, this variant of the imputation method may cause...

In several studies, hedonic methods have been used successfully for the ex post assessment of the accuracy of inflation measurement. Most of those studies relate to high-tech products, with respect to which traditional methods of compiling price indices often fail. We apply hedonic methods to...