Two proposals are made that may facilitate the creation of derivative market instruments, such as futures contracts, cash-settled based on economic indices. The first proposal concerns index number construction: indices based on infrequent measurements of nonstandardized items may control for...

The market portfolio is in one sense the least important portfolio to provide to investors. In an J-agent one-period stochastic endowment economy, where preferences are quadratic, a social-welfare-minded contract designer would never create a contract that would allow trading the market...

Small sample properties of parameter estimates and test statistics in the vector autoregressive dividend ratio model (Campbell and Shiller [1988 a,b]) are derived by stochastic simulation. The data generating processes are co integrated vector autoregressive models, estimated subject to...

Power functions of tests of the random walk hypothesis versus stationary first order autoregressive alternatives are tabulated for samples of fixed span but various frequencies of observation.

In applications, the linear multiple regression model is often modified to allow for nonlinearity in an independent variable. It is argued here that in practice it may often be desirable to specify a Bayesian prior that the unknown functional form is "simple" or "uncomplicated" rather than to...