The aim of the paper is to obtain confidence intervals for the tail index and high quantiles taking into account the optimal rate of convergence of the estimator. The common approach to obtaining confidence intervals presented in the literature is to use the normal distribution approximation at...

This discussion paper resulted in an article in the <I>Journal of Macroeconomics</I> (2010). Volume 32(1), 169-184.<P> We investigate the importance of aggregate and consumer-specific or idiosyncratic labour income risk for aggregate consumption changes in the US over the period 1952-2001. Theoretically,...</p></i>

Often socio-economic variables are measured on a discrete scale or rounded to protect confidentiality. Nevertheless, when exploring the effect of a relevant covariate on the whole outcome distribution of a discrete response variable, virtually all common quantile regression methods require the...

A large number of exact inferential procedures in statistics and econometrics involve the sampling distribution of ratios of random variables. If the denominator variable is positive, then tail probabilities of the ratio can be expressed as those of a suitably defined difference of random...