This paper examines the effect of the proportion of females in the establishment on the male/female wage gap and the effectiveness of an affirmative action program in reducing this gap. A unique data set makes this paper possible since it has information on both individuals and the...

This paper estimates and tests several versions of the consumption-based asset pricing model extended to allow for time-nonseparable preferences and/or liquidity constraint proxies, using Canadian aggregate data. It is found that a habit-persistence effect uncovered in the time-nonseparable...

Volatility clustering is a well-known stylized feature of financial asset returns. In this paper, we investigate the asymmetric pattern of volatility clustering on both the stock and foreign exchange rate markets. To this end, we employ copula-based semi-parametric univariate time-series models...

This paper investigates whether convenience yield is an important factor in determining optimal decisions for a forestry investment. The Kalman filter method is used to estimate three different models of lumber prices: a mean reverting model, a simple geometric Brownian motion and the two-factor...

Selecting an estimator for the variance covariance matrix is an important step in hypothesis testing. From less robust to more robust, the available choices include: Eicker/White heteroskedasticity-robust standard errors, Newey and West heteroskedasticity-and-autocorrelation- robust standard...

In response to the widespread availability of illegal contraband, the federal and five provincial governments in Canada implemented a 40-60% reduction to cigarette excise taxes in February 1994. We exploit this unique and discrete policy shock by estimating the effects of cigarette taxes on...

We study the problem of ?finding the worst-case joint distribution of a set of risk factors given prescribed multivariate marginals and a nonlinear loss function. We show that when the risk measure is CVaR, and the distributions are discretized, the problem can be conveniently solved using...

Numerical challenges inherent in algorithms for computing worst Value-at-Risk in homogeneous portfolios are identified and words of warning concerning their implementation are raised. Furthermore, both conceptual and computational improvements to the Rearrangement Algorithm for approximating...