P-splines are a popular approach for fitting nonlinear effects of continuous covariates in semiparametric regression models. Recently, a Bayesian version for P-splines has been developed on the basis of Markov chain Monte Carlo simulation techniques for inference. In this work we adopt and...

We develop econometric models of ascending (English) auctions which allow for both bidder asymmetries as well as common and/or private value components in bidders' underlying valuations We show that the equilibrium inverse bid functions in each round of the auction are implicitly defined...

We develop a new estimation methodology for dynamic optimization models with unobserved state variables Our approach is semiparametric in the sense of not requiring explicit parametric assumptions to be made concerning the distribution of these unobserved state variables We propose a two-step...

This paper uses Monte Carlo techniques to assess the loss in terms of forecast accuracy which is incurred when the true DGP exhibits parameter instability which is either overlooked or incorrectly modelled. We find that the loss is considerable when a FCM is estimated instead of the true TVCM,...

We explore convenient analytic properties of distributions constructed as mixtures of scaled and shifted t-distributions. A feature that makes this family particularly desirable for econometric applications is that it possesses closed-form expressions for its anti-derivatives (e.g., the...

Recent years have seen a growing literature on the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) that resorts in a large part to cointegration techniques. The EKC literature has failed to acknowledge that such regressions involve unit root nonstationary regressors and their integer powers (e.g. GDP and GDP...

It has become popular recently to apply the multifractal formalism of statistical physics (scaling analysis of structure functions and f(a) singularity spectrum analysis) to financial data. The outcome of such studies is a nonlinear shape of the structure function and a nontrivial behavior of...

Risk neutral densities (RND) can be used to forecast the price of the underlying basis for the option, or it may be used to price other derivates based on the same sequence. The method adopted in this paper to calculate the RND is to firts estimate daily the diffusion process of the underlying...

In this paper we propose exact likelihood-based mean-variance efficiency tests of the market portfolio in the context of Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM), allowing for a wide class of error distributions which include normality as a special case. These tests are developed in the framework of...