This paper studies the estimation of a semi-strong GARCH(1,1) model when it does not have a stationary solution, where semi-strong means that we do not require the errors to be independent over time. We establish necessary and sufficient conditions for a semi-strong GARCH(1,1) process to have a...

For autoregressive moving average (ARMA) models with infinite variance innovations, quasi-likelihood-based estimators (such as Whittle estimators) suffer from complex asymptotic distributions depending on unknown tail indices. This makes statistical inference for such models difficult. In...

Does culture, and in particular religion, exert an independent causal effect on long-term economic growth, or do culture and religion merely reflect the latter? We explore this issue by studying the case of Protestantism in China during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries....

Although structural constraints such as model order and time delay have been incorporated in the continuous time system identification since its origin, the constraints on the estimated model parameters were rarely enforced. This paper proposes a continuous time system identification approach...

The first essay of this dissertation investigates the relationship between downside risk andreturns of real estate investment trusts (REITs) and assesses the performance of real estatemutual funds (REMFs). We measure the asymmetric risk through downside and upside betas andthrough the measures...