This paper investigates the impact of heterogeneous beliefs of professional investors on the currency options market. Using a unique data set with detailed information on the foreign-exchange forecasts of about 50 market participants over more than ten years, we construct an empirical proxy for...

The k Nearest Neighb or (kNN) density estimator first for-malized by Loftsgaarden and Quesenb erry (1965) is central to a broad range of the literature on density estimation. It is knownto b e strongly uniformly consistent if k increases appropriatelywith the sample size. The contribution of...

No, not really. Responding to lingering concerns about the reliability of SVARs, Christiano et al (NBER Macro Annual, 2006, “CEV”) propose to combine OLS estimates of a VAR with a spectral estimate of long-run variance. In principle, thiscould help alleviate specification problems of SVARs in...

We consider testing for correct specification of a nonparametric instrumental variable regression. In this ill-posed inverse problem setting, the test statistic is based on the empirical minimum distance criterion corresponding to the conditional moment restriction evaluated with a Tikhonov...

We revisit the debt overhang question. We first use non-parametric techniques to isolate a panel of countries on the downward sloping section of a debt Laffer curve. In particular, overhang countries are ones where a threshold level of debt is reached in sample, beyond which (initial) debt ends...

We provide a convenient econometric framework for the analysis of nonlinear dependence in financial applications. We introduce models with constrained nonparametric dependence, which specify the conditional distribution or the copula in terms of a one-dimensional functional parameter. Our...

The imprecise Beta model (IBM) of Bernard (1996) and Walley (1996) is the most popular model for learning about a binomial random variable under prior ignorance. Piatti et al. (2005) show that there is a fundamental issue with the interpretation of results produced by the IBM in applications....

Closed-form, trivially evaluated approximations for the density and cumulative distribution function of the doubly noncentral t distribution are developed based on saddlepoint methods. They exhibit remarkable accuracy throughout the entire support of the distribution and are vastly superior to...

The recently proposed class of MixN-GARCH models, which couple a mixed normal distributional structure with linked GARCH-type dynamics, has been shown to offer a plausible decomposition of the contributions to volatility, as well as admirable out-of-sample forecasting performance, for financial...

We consider consistent tests for stochastic dominance efficiency at any order of a given portfolio with respect to all possible portfolios constructed from a set of assets. We justify block bootstrap approaches to achieve valid inference in a time series setting. The test statistics are computed...