Decision theorists claim that an ordinal measure of risk may be sufficient for an agent to make a rational choice under uncertainty. We propose a measure of financial risk, namely the Varying Cross-sectional Risk (VCR), that is based on a ranking of returns. VCR is defined as the probability of...

Using more than two years of daily interest rate cap price data, this paper provides a systematic documentation of a volatility smile in cap prices. We find that Black (1976) implied volatilities exhibit an asymmetric smile (sometimes called a sneer) with a stronger skew for in-the-money caps...

This paper considers tests of misspecification in a heteroscedastic transformation model. We derive Lagrange multiplier (LM) statistics for (i) testing functional form and heteroscedasticity jointly, (ii) testing functional form in the presence of heteroscedasticity, and (iii) testing...

Bootstrap aggregating or Bagging, introduced by Breiman (1996a), has been proved to be effective to improve on unstable forecast. Theoretical and empirical works using classification, regression trees, variable selection in linear and non-linear regression have shown that bagging can generate...

The paper examines the processes underlying economic fluctuations by investigating the volatility moderation of U.S. economy in the early 1980's. We decompose the volatility decline using a dynamic factor framework into a common stochastic trend, common transitory component and idiosyncratic...

We revisit the concept of unpredictability to explore its implications for forecasting strategies in a non-stationary world subject to structural breaks, where model and mechanism differ. Six aspects of the role of unpredictability are distinguished, compounding the four additional mistakes most...

In this paper we consider different periodic extensions of regression models with autoregressive fractionally integrated moving average disturbances for the analysis of daily spot prices of electricity. We show that day-of-the-week periodicity and long memory are important determinants for the...

A large number of microeconomic decision variables such as investments, prices, inventories or employment are characterized by intermittent large adjustments. The behavior of those variables has been often modeled as following state-dependent rules. The optimality of such state-dependent rules...

We report experimental results using a multi-task for simple two-player, two- stage extensive-form games. It is suggested that by creating the perception of a "level playing field" the participants are relieved of responsibility for others since competition on a level playing field is presumed...