It is common practice to identify the number and sources of shocks that move implied volatilities across space and time by applying Principal Components Analysis (PCA) to pooled covariance matrices of changes in implied volatilities. This approach, however, is likely to result in a loss of...

The analysis of diffusion processes in financial models is crucially dependent on the form of the drift and diffusion coefficient functions. A methodology is proposed for estimating and testing coefficient functions for ergodic diffusions that are not directly observable. It is based on...

We consider a problem of estimation of parametric components in a partial linear model. Suppose that a finite set E of linear estimators is given. Our goal is to mimic the estimator in E that has the smallest risk. Using a second order expansion of the risk of linear estimators we propose a...

The bootstrap is a method for estimating the distribution of an estimator or test statistic by resampling one’s data or a model estimated from the data. The methods that are available for implementing the bootstrap and the accuracy of bootstrap estimates depend on whether the data are a random...

The analysis of volatility in financial markets has become a first rank issue in modern financial theory and practice: Whether in risk management, portfolio hedging, or option pricing, we need to have a precise notion of the market's expectation of volatility. Much research has been done on the...

We will show a methodology of incorporating a profound statistical software environment into a standard spreadsheet application. Our approach is based upon a client/server computing philosophy, which will enable the user of our client side application to choose between various types of servers...