This paper is concerned with evaluating value at risk estimates. It is well known that using only binary variables to do this sacrifices too much information. However, most of the specification tests (also called backtests) avaliable in the literature, such as Christoffersen (1998) and Engle and...

We show that the recently developed nonparametric procedure for fitting the term structure of interest rates developed by Linton, Mammen, Nielsen, and Tanggaard (2000) overall performs notably better than the highly flexible McCulloch (1975) cubic spline and Fama and Bliss (1987) bootstrap...