The 2006 spike in corn-based ethanol demand has contributed to the increase in basis volatility in corn and soybean markets across the United States, which has, to a significant degree, led to the observed large jumps in the prices of the two commodities. Despite the overall rise in basis...

Replaced with revised version of paper 07/29/09.

When some explanatory variables in a regression are correlated with the disturbance term, instrumental variable methods are typically employed to make reliable inferences. Furthermore, to avoid difficulties associated with weak instruments, identification robust methods are often proposed....

We provide a generalization of the Anderson-Rubin (AR) procedure for inference on parameters which represent the dependence between possibly endogenous explanatory variables and disturbances in a linear structural equation (endogeneity parameters). We focus on second-order dependence and stress...

Utilizing daily instantaneous forward rates of nominal and inflation-indexed bonds as well as realizations of stock and bond index returns, I examine the informational content of a broad set of macroeconomic announcements. I find evidence that, with a few exceptions, price variables mainly move...

In this dissertation, we analyze whether the noise ratio statistic of Durlauf and Hall (1989), NRT, can be used as a non-nested model selection tool in a similar fashion to the Rivers and Vuong (2002) framework. For this purpose, we first show that, when scaled by the sample size T, NRT is...

Three major regression-based seasonal unit root tests: the DHF test introduced by Dickey et al (1984), the HEGY test proposed by Hylleberg et al. (1990) and the Kunst test introduced by Kunst (1997) are compared. The regression model for the DHF test is a reduced form of that for the Kunst test....

This dissertation relates to three recent methods of instrument selection in econometrics, namely, the Canonical Correlations Information Criterion (CCIC), the Relevant Moments Selection Criterion (RMSC) and the approximate Mean Square Error Criterion (MSE). Usual canonical correlations measure...

GMM provides a computationally convenient estimation method and the resulting estimator can be shown to be consistent and asymptotically normal under the fairly moderate regularity conditions. It is widely known that the information content in the population moment condition has impacts on the...

This dissertation consists of three essays on modeling and parameter estimation for covariance non-stationary processes. The first essay considers the non-linear deformation of time scale for G(lambda)-stationary processes developed by Jiang, Gray and Woodward [2006]. After the appropriate...