History is important to the study of financial bubbles precisely because they are extremely rare events, but history can be misleading. The rarity of bubbles in the historical record makes the sample size for inference small. Restricting attention to crashes that followed a large increase in...

We re-examine the methods used in estimating comovements among U.S. regional home prices and find that there are insufficient moments to ensure a normal limit necessary for employing the quasi-maximum likelihood estimator. Hence, we propose applying the self- weighted quasi-maximum exponential...

In certain cases partial sums of i.i.d. random variables with finite variance are better approximated by asequence of stable distributions with indices alpha n - 2 than by a normal distribution. We discusswhen this happens and how much the convergence rate can be improved by using penultimate...