We introduce a new method for the estimation of discount functions, yield curves and forward curves from government issued coupon bonds. Our approach is non-parametric and does not assume particular functional form for the discount function although we do show how to impose various restrictions...

Prospective customers of financial and insurance products can be targeted based on the profit the provider expects to earn from them. We present a model for individual expected profit and two alternatives for calculating optimal personalized prices that maximize the expected profit. For one of...

In this paper, we apply machine learning to forecast the conditional variance of long-term stock returns measured in excess of different benchmarks, considering the short- and long-term interest rate, the earnings-by-price ratio, and the inflation rate. In particular, we apply in a two-step...

We investigate a new separable nonparametric model for time series, which includes many ARCH models and AR models already discussed in the literature. We also propose a new estimation procedure based on a localization of the econometric method of instrumental variables. Our method has...

We develop inference tools in a semiparametric regression model with missing response data. A semiparametric regression imputation estimator and an empirical likelihood based one for the mean of the response variable are defined. Both the estimators are proved to be asymptotically normal, with...

We propose a new method of testing stochastic dominance which improves on existing tests based on bootstrap or subsampling. Our test requires estimation of the contact sets between the marginal distributions. Our tests have asymptotic sizes that are exactly equal to the nominal level uniformly...

We investigate a model in which we connect slowly time varying unconditional long-run volatility with short-run conditional volatility whose representation is given as a semi-strong GARCH (1,1) process with heavy tailed errors. We focus on robust estimation of both long-run and short-run...

This paper considers the class of p-dimensional elliptic distributions (p = 1) satisfying the consistency property (Kano, 1994) and within this general framework presents a two-stage semiparametric estimator for the Lebesgue density based on Gaussian mixture sieves. Under the online...

This paper develops methodology for semiparametric panel data models in a setting where both the time series and the cross section are large. Such set tings are common in finance and other areas of economics. Our model allows for heterogeneous nonparametric covariate effects as well as...

The so-called leverage hypothesis is that negative shocks to prices/ returns affect volatility more than equal positive shocks. Whether this is attributable to changing financial leverage is still subject to dispute but the terminology is in wide use. There are many tests of the leverage...