This paper considers Value at Risk measures constructed under a discrete mixture of normal distribution on the innovations with time-varying volatility, or MN-GARCH, model. We adopt an approach based on the continuous empirical characteristic function to estimate the param eters of the model...

Wage posting models of job search typically assume that firms can commit to paying workers the posted wage. This paper investigates the consequences of relaxing this assumption. Under "downward" commitment firms can commit only to paying at least their advertised wage. We show that wage posting...

This paper develops an e±cient method for estimating the discrete mix- tures of normal family based on the continuous empirical characteristic function (CECF). An iterated estimation procedure based on the closed form objective distance function is proposed to improve the estimation effciency....

This paper extends the stochastic conditional duration model by imposing mixtures of bivariate normal distributions on the innovations of the observation and latent equations of the duration process. This extension allows the model not only to capture the asymmetric behavior of the expected...

This paper investigates an e±cient estimation method for a class of switching regressions based on the characteristic function (CF). We show that with the exponential weighting function, the CF based estimator can be achieved from minimizing a closed form distance measure. Due to the...

This paper presents a simple two-factor model of nominal term structure of interest rates, in which the log-price kernel has an autoregressive drift process and a nonlinear GARCH volatility process. With these two state-variable processes, closed-form solutions are derived for zero-coupon bond...

We evaluate the effects of higher beer prices on gonorrhea, chlamydia, and teen pregnancy rates by pooling data across Canadian provinces over time. Higher real beer prices are significantly correlated with a reduction in both gonorrhea and chlamydia rates with price elasticities ranging from...

The predominant perspective on perinatal family labour supply in the theoretical and empirical economics literature is that careers and children are simultaneous choices, so conditioning on the prenatal career ambitions of individuals, and particularly women, the event of a birth has little or...

We use data from the Canadian National Population Health Survey and the Canadian Institute for Health Information to estimate the relation- ship between per capita supply of physicians, both general practitioners and specialists, on health status. Measures of quality of life, self-assessed...

This paper presents a new class of time-deformation (or stochastic volatility) models for stock returns sampled in transaction time and directed by a generalized duration process. Stochastic volatility in this model is driven by an observed duration process and a latent autoregressive process....