This paper is motivated by our attempt to answer an empirical question: how is private health insurance take-up in Australia affected by the income threshold at which the Medicare Levy Surcharge (MLS) kicks in? We propose a new difference de-convolution kernel estimator for the location and size...

On purpose to extract trend and cycle from a time series many competing techniques have been developed. The probably most prevalent is the Hodrick Prescott filter. However this filter suffers from diverse shortcomings, especially the subjective choice of its penalization parameter. To this point...

We introduce a statistical test for comparing the predictive accuracy of competing copula specifications in multivariate density forecasts, based on the Kullback-Leibler Information Criterion (KLIC). The test is valid under general conditions: in particular it allows for parameter estimation...

In this paper, we develop a general method of testing for independence when unobservable generalized errors are involved. Our method can be applied to testing for serial independence of generalized errors, and testing for independence between the generalized errors and observable covariates. The...

This paper develops a specification test for functional form for models identified by moment restrictions, including IV and GMM settings. The general framework is one where the moment restrictions are specified as functions of data, a finite-dimensional parameter vector, and a nonparametric real...

We propose a new method of testing stochastic dominance which improves on existing tests based on bootstrap or sub-sampling. 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 propose semiparametric model averaging schemes for nonlinear dynamic time series regression models with a very large (ultra) number of covariates including exogenous regressors and auto-regressive lags. Our purpose is to obtain accurate forecasts of a response variable making use of a large...

The volatility implied by observed market prices as a function of the strike and time to maturity form an Implied Volatility Surface (IV S). Practical applications require reducing the dimension and characterize its dynamics through a small number of factors. Such dimension reduction is...

This paper proposes a nonparametric test of causality in quantile. Zheng (1998) has proposed an idea to reduce the problem of testing a quantile restriction to a problem of testing a particular type of mean restriction in independent data. We extend Zheng's approach to the case of dependent...

Pair-copula constructions are flexible models for the dependence in a random vector that have attracted a lot of interest in recent years. In this paper, we use generalized additive models to extend pair-copula constructions to allow for effects of covariates on the dependence parameters. We let...