Multiple delivery specifications exist on nearly all commodity futures contracts. Sellers are typically allowed to choose among several grades of the underlying commodity. On the delivery day, the futures price converges to the spot price of the cheapest-to-deliver grade rather than to that of...

When making decisions, agents tend to make use of decisions others have made in similar situations. Ignoring this behavior in empirical models can be interpreted as a problem of omitted variables and may seriously bias parameter estimates and harm inference. We suggest a possibility of...

Models of international tax competition typically assume the existence of a benevolent government. This paper presents a model which integrates the view of government as source of inefficiency with an analysis of distorting taxes on capital investment, savings and labor income in a common...

In this paper data-driven algorithms for fitting SEMIFAR models (Beran, 1999) are proposed. The algorithms combine the data-driven estimation of the nonparamet- ric trend and maximum likelihood estimation of the parameters. Convergence and asymptotic properties of the proposed algorithms are...

This paper describes simple econometric methods for the analysis of credit risk and applies them to a data set obtained from credit files taken from six large German universal banks. The paper focuses on (i) binary and ordered probit/logit models which enable the credit analyst to quantify the...

We obtain the global existence and uniqueness result for a one-dimensional back- ward stochastic Riccati equation, whose generator contains a quadratic term of L (the second unknown component). This solves the one-dimensional case of Bismut- Peng's problem which was initially proposed by Bismut...

The choice of a smoothing parameter or bandwidth is crucial when applying non- parametric regression estimators. In nonparametric mean regression various meth- ods for bandwidth selection exists. But in nonparametric quantile regression band- width choice is still an unsolved problem. In this...