An abundance of high quality data sets requiring heavy tailed models necessitates reliablemethods of estimating the shape parameter governing the degree of tail heaviness.The Hill estimator is a popular method for doing this but its practical use isencumbered by several difficulties. We show...

In certain cases the distribution of the normalized maximumof a sample can be better approximated by a sequence ofdifferent extreme value distributions than by the final one. Weshow that these cases are rather restricted and that the possibleimprovement is not spectacular.

The stability of the financial system at higher loss levels is either characterized by asymptotic dependence or asymptotic independence. If asymptotically independent, the dependency, when present, eventually dies out completely at the more extreme quantiles, as in case of the multivariate...

Internet auctions attract numerous agents, but only a few become active bidders. A major difficulty in the structural analysis of internet auctions is that the number of potential bidders is unknown. Under the independent private value paradigm (IPVP)the valuations of the active bidders form a...

We use a subsample bootstrap method to get a consistent estimate of the asymptotically optimal choice of the samplefraction, in the sense of minimal mean squared error, which is needed for tail index estimation. Unlike previous methodsour procedure is fully self contained. In particular, the...