What is Statistics? Opinions vary. In fact, there is a continuous spectrum of attitudes toward statistics ranging from pure theoreticians, proving asymptotic efficiency and searching for most powerful tests, to wild practitioners, blindly reporting p-values and claiming statistical significance...

This paper considers an empirical likelihood method to estimate the parameters of the quantile regression (QR) models and to construct confidence regions that are accurate in finite samples. To achieve the higher-order refinements, we smooth the estimating equations for the empirical likelihood....

Market risk management is one of the key factors to success in managing financial institutions. Underestimated risk can have desastrous consequences for individual companies and even whole economies, not least as could be seen during the recent crises. Overestimated risk, on the other side, may...

While permutation tests and bootstraps have very wide-ranging application, both share a common potential drawback: as data-intensive resampling methods, both can be runtime prohibitive when applied to large or even medium-sized data samples drawn from large datasets. The data explosion over the...

[Update: Within four weeks of the original publication of this research report, Risk Magazine reported in its 28th February 2012 issue story titled 'Goodbye VaR? Basel to Consider Other Risk Metrics': "A review of trading book capital rules, due to be launched in March by the Basel Committee on...

Recent periods of market turbulence and stress have created considerable interest in credible alternatives to traditional asset allocation methodologies. It would be preferred if portfolios can be decomposed into components that can be directly connected to independent risks and individually...

To create their rankings, university-ranking agencies usually combine multiple performance measures into a composite index. However, both rankings and index scores are sensitive to the weights assigned to performance measures. This paper uses a stochastic dominance efficiency methodology to...