Deconvolution is a useful statistical technique for recovering an unknown density in the presence of measurement error. Typically, the method hinges on stringent assumptions about teh nature of the measurement error, more specifically, that the distribution is *entirely* known. We relax this...

The paper reviews the best-developed and most frequently applied methods of credit scoring employed by commercial banks when evaluating loan applications. The authors concentrate on retail loans – applied research in this segment is limited, though there has been a sharp increase in the volume...

This paper addresses the issue of symmetry in financial returns. The return distributions of the major stocks traded on the Portuguese market and included in the PSI-20 Index are examined for periods from four to nine years. The results show that the symmetry of the returns is rejected against...

The goal of the Basle II regulatory formula is to model the unexpected loss on a loan portfolio. The regulatory formula is based on an asymptotic portfolio unexpected default rate estimation that is multiplied by an estimate of the loss given default parameter. This simplification leads to a...

Using daily return data from the four major Central and Eastern European stock markets including fourteen highly liquid stocks and ATX (Vienna), PX (Prague), BUX (Budapest), and WIG20 (Warsaw) market indices, we model the value-at-risk using a set of univariate GARCH-type models. Our results...

This paper estimates return to schooling for african and coloured women in South Africa. It compares parametric and semiparametric estimates of the sample selection model for the case of return to schooling. The parametric estimator is the one proposed by Heckman (1979) and the semiparametric...

In this article we analyze the evolution of relative per capita income distribution of Brazilian municipalities over the period 1970-1996. Our analyses are based on nonparametric methodologies and do not assume probability distributions or functional forms for the data. We have carried out two...

There is conflicting evidence regarding the recent evolution of unemployment duration in the U.S. In this study we rely on censored quantile regression methods to analyze the changes in the US unemployment duration distribution. We employed the decomposition method proposed by Machado and Mata...

In this study I apply quantile regression techniques to the well-known Oaxaca coefficient of discrimination. This methodology provides different coefficients for different quantiles of the conditional wage distribution and is more informative than the technique based on OLS regression, which...

In this paper we propose a nonparametric regression frontier model that assumes no specific parametric family of densities for the unobserved stochastic component that represents efficiency in the model. Nonparametric estimation of the regression frontier is obtained using a local linear...