This paper analyzes the application of the Markov-switching ARCH model (Hamilton and Susmel, 1994) in improving value-at-risk (VaR) forecast. By considering a mixture of normal distributions with varying variances over different time and regimes, we find that the “spurious high...

In previous research, I find that a reduction of the cost-of-living adjustment has performed quite well in comparisons among different Social Security reform proposals. While a COLA reduction contains many positive features, there is some concern that it would push the most vulnerable members of...

This paper assesses the effects of agency costs and asymmetric information in credit markets. Asymmetric information and agency costs occur whenever lenders delegate control over resources to borrowers, leading to adverse selection, moral hazard and monitoring costs because of the inability to...

This paper first show that South Korea's industrial targeting in the name of heavy and chemical industry drive in the 1970s managed to produce industries with international competitiveness over time. It then performs ex post cost-benefit analysis to show that industrial targeting in Korea has...

A new class of specification tests is proposed to detect for neglected nonlinearity and dynamic misspecification in panel models. The tests can detect a wide range of model misspecifications while being robust to conditional heteroskedasticity and higher order time-varying moments of unknown...

Economic models often imply that certain variables are cointegrated. However, tests often fail to reject the null hypothesis of no cointegration for these variables. One possible explanation of these test results is that the error is unit root nonstationary due to a nonstationary measurement...

Many securities are, to a certain extent, subject to credit risk in one way or another. Both the financial institutions and regulators are keen to have their credit risk exposures well managed. In order to fulfill their needs, the market for credit derivatives has become one of the fast growing...

This paper concerns a new statistical approach to instrumental variables (IV) method for nonparametric structural models with additive errors. A general identifying condition of the model is proposed, based on richness of the space generated by marginal discretizations of joint density...

In this paper, we analyze the strength and nature of bequest motives in the United States using data from the 2000 Health and Retirement Study (HRS). The results of our analysis suggest that bequest motives are very strong in the United States and that they are altruistically motivated. This...

This study focuses on the estimation of household demand for immunization as well as its technological effect on the survival probability of a child in rural India. Careful attention is paid to the consequences of parental selection and heterogeneity on survival technology. The results suggest...