Regarding the asymmetric and leptokurtic behavior of financial data, we propose a new contagion test in the quantile regression framework that is robust to model misspecification. Unlike conventional correlation-based tests, the proposed quantile contagion test allows us to investigate the stock...

type="main" xml:id="obes12068-abs-0001" <title type="main">Abstract</title> <p>In specifying a regression equation, we need to specify which regressors to include, but also how these regressors are measured. This gives rise to two levels of uncertainty: concepts (level 1) and measurements within each concept (level 2). In...</p>

The resource curse has been mainly studied using cross-country samples. In this paper we analyze a cross-province sample from one country: China. We focus on the interplay between resource abundance, institutional quality, and economic growth, using two different measures of resource abundance...

A `dress-up contest' is a competition for the best public image, and fiscal decentralisation can lead to such contests between local governments. In this paper we model the dress-up contest and investigate how it a effects social welfare. We show that yardstick competition (due to fiscal...

This papers offers a theoretical explanation for the stylized fact that forecast combinations with estimated optimal weights often perform poorly in applications. The properties of the forecast combination are typically derived under the assumption that the weights are fixed, while in practice...

How brand slogans can influence and change the consumers’ perception of image of products has been a topic of great interest to marketers. However, it is a non-trivial task to evaluate how brand slogans affect their customers’ emotions and how the emotions influence the customers’...

This thesis first investigates various issues related with model averaging, and then evaluates two policies, i.e. West Development Drive in China and fiscal decentralization in U.S, using econometric tools. Chapter 2 proposes a hierarchical weighted least squares (HWALS) method to address...

Abstract: Prediction under model uncertainty is an important and difficult issue. Traditional prediction methods (such as pretesting) are based on model selection followed by prediction in the selected model, but the reported prediction and the reported prediction variance ignore the uncertainty...

This paper reconsiders the ‘curse of resources’ hypothesis for the case of China, and distinguishes between resource abundance, resource rents, and resource dependence. Resource abundance and resource rents are shown to be approximately equivalent, and their association with resource...