The Pareto classical distribution is one of the most attractive in statistics and particularly in the scenario of actuarial statistics and finance. For example, it is widely used when calculating reinsurance premiums. In the last years, many alternative distributions have been proposed to obtain...

Based on OECD evidence, equity/housing-price busts and credit crunches are followed by substantial increases in public consumption. These increases in unproductive public spending lead to increases in distortionary marginal taxes, a policy in sharp contrast with presumably optimal Keynesian...

Based on OECD evidence, equity/housing-price busts and credit crunches are followed by substantial increases in public consumption. These increases in unproductive public spending lead to increases in distortionary marginal taxes, a policy in sharp contrast with presumably optimal Keynesian...

During 2012–2015, the motor insurance in Russia received considerable attention both from the parts of the Russian government and from the insurance business. This was caused, in particular, by significant losses from the side of insurance companies that occurred during 2012–2013. Experts...

We derive new tests for proper calibration of multivariate density forecasts based on Rosenblatt probability integral transforms. These tests have the advantage that they i) do not depend on the ordering of variables in the forecasting model, ii) are applicable to densities of arbitrary...

In this paper, we see how much the average monthly frequency of price changes ties down the behavior of firms in steady-state in terms of the average length of price-spells across firms. We use the UK CPI data at the aggregate and sectoral level and find that the actual mean is about twice the...

The monthly frequency of price-changes is a prominent feature of many studies of the CPI micro-data. In this paper, we see how much this ties down the behavior of price-setters ("firms") in steady-state in terms of the average length of price-spells across firms. We are able to divide an upper...

We propose a new three-step model-selection framework for size distributions in empirical data. It generalizes a recent frequentist plausibility-of-fit analysis (Step 1) and combines it with a relative ranking based on the Bayesian Akaike Information Criterion (Step 2). We enhance these...

The authors apply a class of Markov switching models (independent spike models) to six European electricity markets and two European gas markets. This paper extends the current framework by introducing Gamma distributed spikes, which improves the fit for most energy markets. The models are quite...