This paper examines a class of contractual relationships with specific investment, a non-durable trading opportunity, and renegotiation. Trade actions are modeled as individual and trade-action-based option contracts (“non-forcing contractsâ€) are explored. The paper identifies an...

A major environmental tragedy of modern times is the widespread arsenic contamination of shallow drinking water wells in Bangladesh. High levels of arsenic present in many wells went unrecognized for years. Now large numbers of people show a range of symptoms associated with chronic arsenic...

It is shown that the limiting distribution of the augmented Dickey-Fuller (ADF) test under the null hypothesis of a unit root is valid under a very general set of assumptions that goes far beyond the linear AR (∞) process assumption typically imposed. In essence, all that is required is...

We consider writing a derivative contract on some underlying asset in such a way that the derivative contract and underlying asset yield the same payo� distribution after one time period. Using the Hardy-Littlewood rearrangement inequality, we obtain an explicit solution for the cheapest...

We address the problem of estimating the autocovariance matrix of a stationary process. Under short range dependence assumptions, convergence rates are established for a gradually tapered version of the sample autocovariance matrix and for its inverse. The proposed estimator is formed by leaving...

This paper considers the problem of distribution estimation for the studentized sample mean in the context of Long Memory and Negative Memory time series dynamics, adopting the fixed-bandwidth approach now popular in the econometrics literature. The distribution theory complements the Short...

Economic and financial time series frequently exhibit time irreversible dynamics. For instance, there is considerable evidence of asymmetric fluctuations in many macroeconomic and financial variables, and certain game theoretic models of price determination predict asymmetric cycles in price...

The National Bank of Poland does not publish the Monetary Policy Council's voting records before the subsequent policy meeting. Using real-time data, this paper shows that a prompter release of the voting records could improve the predictability of policy decisions. The voting patterns reveal...

The problem of prediction is revisited with a view towards going beyond the typical nonparametric setting and reaching a fully model-free environment for predictive inference, i.e., point predictors and predictive intervals. A basic principle of model-free prediction is laid out based on the...