In this paper, we consider testing marginal distributional assumptions. Special cases that we consider are the Pearson's family like the Gaussian, Student, Gamma, Beta and uniform distributions. The test statistics we consider are based on the first moment conditions derived by Hansen and...

In this paper it is shown that "classical" tests can become asymptotically inadmissible (i.e. we show that there exist uniformly better tests) if the information matrix becomes stochastic: A typical example is the augmented Dickey-Fuller test for unit roots (in case of no deterministic trend. We...

A correctly specified time series model can be used to transform the data set to obtain an i.i.d. sequence of random variables, assuming that the true parameter values are known. In reality, however, one only has an estimated model and must therefore address the sampling error associated with...

We present a general framework for testing the accuracy of Value-at-Risk (VaR) forecasts. The approach is based on the observation that violations – the days on which portfolio losses exceed the VaR – should be unpredictable. Specifically, these violations form a martingale difference...

In this paper we investigate portfolio coskewness using a quadratic market model as return generating process. It is shown that portfolios of small (large) firms have negative (positive) coskewness with market. An asset pricing model including coskewness is tested through the restrictions it...

We provide an argument for the limitation of Edgeworth expansions to many commonly used statistics in the weak instrument framework. However, we show that Edgeworth expansions hold for approximately similar tests regardless of the identification conditions. Finally, we consider simulation...

The aim of this paper is to give a formal definition and consistent estimates of the extremes of a population. This definition relies on a threshold value that delimits the extremes and on the uniform convergence of the distribution of these extremes to a Pareto type distribution. The tail...

Evaluation of forecast optimality in economics and finance has almost exclusively been conducted under the assumption of mean squared error loss. Under this loss function optimal forecasts should be unbiased and forecast errors should be serially uncorrelated at the single period horizon with...