This dissertation relates to three recent methods of instrument selection in econometrics, namely, the Canonical Correlations Information Criterion (CCIC), the Relevant Moments Selection Criterion (RMSC) and the approximate Mean Square Error Criterion (MSE). Usual canonical correlations measure...

Chemodynamic therapy (CDT), which is featured with high tumor specificity and selectivity, has aroused extensive interest as an advanced anti-cancer approach. However, chemodynamic therapeutic efficacy heavily relies on the level of endogenous hydrogen peroxide (H 2 O 2 ) that is intrinsically...

Value at Risk and the Expected Shortfall are two measurements of market risks for financial assets. Statistically, they are extreme quantiles of the distribution of financial log returns. Though financial log return data are usually both heteroscedastic and fatter-tailed, most of the existing...

Modeling portfolio credit risk involves the default dependencies between the individual securities in a portfolio. The copula is a common approach to construct it. It parameterizes the joint distribution of individual defaults independently of their marginal distributions. The current market...

In stochastic volatility models, the unit root test on the time series of the unobserved log-volatilities may be performed by applying the commonly usedfrequentist unit root tests. For instance, augmented Dickey Fuller tests based on the log-squared meancorrected returns can be used. The...

GMM provides a computationally convenient estimation method and the resulting estimator can be shown to be consistent and asymptotically normal under the fairly moderate regularity conditions. It is widely known that the information content in the population moment condition has impacts on the...

This thesis builds a stochastic volatility model for the term structure of interest rates, which is also known as the dynamics of the yield curve. The main purpose of the model is to propose a parsimonious and plausible approach to capture some characteristics that conform to some empirical...