According to the Sharpe-Lintner capital asset pricing model, expected rates of return on individual stocks differ only because of their different levels of non-diversifiable risk (beta). However, Fama/French (1992) show that the two variables size and book-to-market ratio capture the...

Alternative modeling strategies for specifying subset VAR models are considered. It is shown that under certain conditions a testing procedure based on t-ratios is equivalent to sequentially eliminating lags that lead to the largest improvement in a prespecified model selection criterion. A...

The efficient market hypothesis implies that asset prices cannot be cointegrated. On the other hand, arbitrage processes prevent prices of fundamentally related assets from drifting far away. An attractive model that reconciles these two conflicting facts is the nonlinear error correction...

This paper tests the validity of Present Value (PV) models of stock prices by employing a two-step strategy for testing the null hypothesis of no cointegration against alternatives which are fractionally cointegrated. Monte Carlo simulations are conducted to evaluate the power and size...

This study examines the relative importance of political and economic variables in the determination of a country’s standing in credit ratings provided by commercial rating agencies. It finds that creditworthiness appears to be determined primarily by economic variables. While including...

In discussing the June 2014 paper, Executive Directors broadly supported staff's proposal to introduce more flexibility into the Fund's exceptional access framework to reduce unnecessary costs for the member, its creditors, and the overall system. Directors' views varied on staff's proposal to...

We develop a new test of a parametric model of a conditional mean function against a nonparametric alternative. The test adapts to the unknown smoothness of the alternative model and is uniformly consistent against alternatives whose distance from the parametric model converges to zero at the...

This paper establishes the almost. sure consistency of least. squares regression series estimators, in the L2-norm and the sup-norm, under very large assumptions on the underlying model. Three examples are considered in order to illustrate the general results: trigonometric series, Legendre...

In the semiparametric additive hazard regression model of McKeague and Sasieni (1994), the hazard contributions of some covariates are allowed to change over time, without parametric restrictions (Aalen model), while the contributions of other covariates are assumed to be constant. In this...

In the setup of i.i.d. observations and a real valued differentiable functional T, locally asymptotic upper bounds are derived for the power of one-sided tests (simple, versus large values of T) and for the confidence probability of lower confidence limits (for the value of T), in the case that...