This paper explores tests of the hypothesis that the tail thickness of a distribution is constant over time. Using Hill's conditional maximum likelihood estimator for the tail index of a distribution, tests of tail shape constancy are constructed that allow for an unknown breakpoint. The...

The structure of the international monetary system is once again a topic of great interest and controversy -- among economists, business managers, financiers, and government leaders. Many members of all these groups are acutely dissatisfied with the floating exchange rate regime that succeeded...

Most institutional and individual portfolios are very undiversified in real estate: many hold no real estate at all, many have holdings highly concentrated in certain regions or types of real estate. The risk of these concentrated holdings is not hedged. We propose here that cash-settled futures...

We examine the link between increases in housing wealth, financial wealth, and consumer spending. We rely upon a panel of 14 countries observed annually for various periods during the past 25 years and a panel of U.S. states observed quarterly during the 1980s and 1990s. We impute the aggregate...

We re-examine the link between changes in housing wealth, financial wealth, and consumer spending. We extend a panel of U.S. states observed quarterly during the seventeen-year period, 1982 through 1999, to the thirty-one year period, 1978 through 2009. Using techniques reported previously, we...

We propose a new adequacy test and a graphical evaluation tool for nonlinear dynamic models. The proposed techniques can be applied in any setup where parametric conditional distribution of the data is specified, in particular to models involving conditional volatility, conditional higher...

A prominent use of local to unity limit theory in applied work is the construction of confidence intervals for autogressive roots through inversion of the ADF t statistic associated with a unit root test, as suggested in Stock (1991). Such confidence intervals are valid when the true model has...

A unifying framework for inference is developed in predictive regressions where the predictor has unknown integration properties and may be stationary or nonstationary. Two easily implemented nonparametric F-tests are proposed. The test statistics are related to those of Kasparis and Phillips...