Parametric mixture models are commonly used in applied work, especially empirical economics, where these models are often employed to learn for example about the proportions of various types in a given population. This paper examines the inference question on the proportions (mixing probability)...

Parametric mixture models are commonly used in applied work, especially empiri- cal economics, where these models are often employed to learn for example about the proportions of various types in a given population. This paper examines the inference question on the proportions (mixing...

We propose new methods for estimating the bid-ask spread from observed transaction prices alone. Our methods are based on the empirical characteristic function instead of the sample autocovariance function like the method of Roll (1984). As in Roll (1984), we have a closed form expression for...