Fund-of-funds (FoF) managers face the task of selecting a (relatively) small number ofhedge funds from a large universe of candidate funds. We analyse whether such a selectioncan be successfully achieved by looking at the track records of the available funds alone,using advanced statistical...

This paper focuses on the robust Effcient Method of Moments (EMM) estimation of a general parametric stationary process and proposes a broad framework for constructing robust EMM statistics in this context. This extends the application field of robust statistics to very general time series...

Driven by the rise in computational power, it has become popular to measure integrated variance with high-frequency squared returns. Though the squared return is a natural choice as a variance estimate, it is not the most efficient one for a given interval length. Extreme-value based estima-...

To analyze whether stock-market prices follow a random walk, the algebraic sign of their returns has been compared with a coin toss, which is a prominent example for a Bernoulli trial with equiprobable outcomes. Like coin tosses, signed returns lend themselves for a simple runs test for...

In recent years, numerous volatility-based derivative products have been engineered. This has led to interest in constructing conditional predictive densities and confidence intervals for integrated volatility. In this paper, we propose nonparametric kernel estimators of the aforementioned...

The main objective of this paper is to propose a feasible, model free estimator of the predictive density of integrated volatility. In this sense, we extend recent papers by Andersen, Bollerslev, Diebold and Labys (2003), and by Andersen, Bollerslev and Meddahi (2004, 2005), who address the...

We propose estimators of the memory parameter of a time series that are robust to a wide variety of random level shift processes, deterministic level shifts and deterministic time trends. The estimators are simple trimmed versions of the popular log-periodogram regression estimator that employ...

Empirical volatility studies have discovered nonstationary, long-memory dynamics in the volatility of the stock market and foreign exchange rates. This highly persistent, infinite variance - but still mean reverting - behavior is commonly found with nonparametric estimates of the fractional...

Applied researchers often want to make inference for the difference of a given performance measure for two investment strategies. In this paper, we consider the class of performance measures that are smooth functions of population means of the underlying returns; this class is very rich and...

In the current paper, the finite-sample stability of various implementations of the KPSS test is studied. The implementations considered differ in how the so-called long-run variance is estimated under the null hypothesis. More specifically, the effects that the choice of kernel, the value of...