Recent portfolio choice asset pricing and option valuation models highlight the importance of skewness and kurtosis. Since skewness and kurtosis are related to extreme variations they are also important for Value-at-Risk measurements. Our framework builds on a GARCH model with a condi-tional...

Among several concepts encompassed by the idea of an equilibrium rate of unemployment (labour mismatch, unemployment trend, non inflationary unemployment, structural unemployment), the NAIRU appears as the most intereting one for a central bank since it focuses directly on inflation. Thus, the...

Estimating a forward-looking monetary policy rule by the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) has become a popular approach since the influential paper by Clarida, Gali, and Gertler (1998). However, an abundant econometric literature underlines the unappealing small-samples properties of GMM...

In this paper, we estimate two small, forward-looking, macroeconomic models for the US and Germany and we compare the implied optimal monetary policy rules.

We develop a new methodology that measures conditional dependency. We achieve this by using copula functions that link marginal distributions, here chosen to obey a GARCH-type model with time-varying skewness and kurtosis. We apply this model to daily returns of stock-market indices. We find...

In this paper, financial infrastructures increase the efficiency of the banking sector: they decrease the market power (due to horizontal differentiation) of the financial intermediaries, lower the cost of capital, increase the number of depositors and the amount of intermediated savings,...

Non parametric and parametric estimation for the spectral density of a stationary process is a well-known topic, except when the spectrum vanishes for some frequency. Indeed, for this frequency, the limit law degenerates, and traditional inference no longer applies. The paper introduces non...

In this paper, we show how to estimate consistently the degree of fractional integration at a given frequency K, for both stationary and non stationary long-memory process. The statistics used are the periodigram for values Kn which converge to K with an appropriate rate. We also introduce tests...

It is well-known that traditional inference do not apply when the spectral density of a stationary process vanishes for some frequency. This paper examines some properties of several new non parametric tests of this hypothesis which have been recently proposed by Lacroix (1999). These tests...

In the following paper the authors start with a review of theoretical elements of extreme value theory (evt). In the empirical section of this study they consider five mature markets, nine Asian, six Eastern European, and seven Latin American emerging markets. The tail-behavior of returns is...