We consider the problem of testing whether the observations X1, · · ·, Xn of a time series are independent with unspecified (possibly nonidentical) distributions symmetric about a common known median. Various bounds on the distributions of serial correlation coefficients are proposed:...

We propose methods for testing hypothesis of non-causality at various horizons, as defined in Dufour and Renault (1998, Econometrica). We study in detail the case of VAR models and we propose linear methods based on running vector autoregressions at different horizons. While the hypotheses...

This paper proposes a new nonparametric test for conditional independence, which is based on the comparison of Bernstein copula densities using the Hellinger distance. The test is easy to implement because it does not involve a weighting function in the test statistic, and it can be applied in...

Understanding the dynamics of interest rates and the term structure has important implications for issues as diverse as real economic activity, monetary policy, pricing of interest rate derivative securities and public debt financing. Our paper follows a longstanding tradition of using factor...

This paper focuses on whether monetary policy has asymmetric effects. By building on the Markov switching model introduced by Hamilton (1989), we examine questions like: Does monetary policy have the same effect regardless of the current phase of economic fluctuations? Given that the economy is...

It has been observed that upon trading-off the costs and benefits of pollution control, profit-maximizing firms may choose not to invest their resources in pollution abatement since the expected penalty imposed by regulators falls considerably short of the investment costs. Regulators have...

Bundle trading is a new trend in financial markets that allows traders to submit consolidated orders to sell and buy packages of assets. We propose a new formulation for portfolio bundle trading that extends the previous models of the literature through a more detailed representation of...

Recent work in asset pricing has focused on market-wide variance as a systematic factor and on firm-specific variance as idiosyncratic risk. We study an alternative channel through which the variability of financial market returns may help our understanding of cross-sectional price formation in...

Understanding and measuring the relative roles of different causal channels between commodity prices and exchange rates has important implications in financial decision making, especially for market participants with short horizons. From a macroeconomic perspective, this can also be useful for...

Statistical tests in vector autoregressive (VAR) models are typically based on large-sample approximations, involving the use of asymptotic distributions or bootstrap techniques. After documenting that such methods can be very misleading even with fairly large samples, especially when the number...