Understanding the dynamics of spot interest rates is important for derivatives pricing, risk management, interest rate liberalization, and macroeconomic control. Based on a daily data of Chinese 7-day repo rates from July 22, 1996 to August 26, 2004, we estimate and test a variety of popular...

This paper addresses the estimation of a semiparametric sample selection index model where both the selection rule and the outcome variable are binary. Since the marginal effects are often of primary interest and are difficult to recover in a semiparametric setting, we develop estimators for...

This paper proposes a new framework for analyzing the effects of sequences of treatments with duration outcomes. Applications include sequences of active labor market policies assigned at specific unemployment durations and sequences of medical treatments. We consider evaluation under...

Two econometric issues arise in the estimation of complete systems of producer or consumer demands when many non-negativity constraints are binding for a large share of observations, as frequently occurs with micro-level data. The first is computational. The econometric model is essentially an...

This paper considers treatment evaluation in a discrete time setting in which treatment could start at any point in time. A typical application is an active labor market policy program which could start after any elapsed unemployment duration. It is shown that various average effects on survival...

We revisit the question whether commodities should be included in investors' portfolios. We employ for the first time a stochastic dominance efficiency (SDE) approach to construct optimal portfolios with and without commodities and we evaluate their comparative performance. SDE circumvents the...

Daily futures returns on six important commodities are found to be well described as FIGARCH fractionally integrated volatility processes, with small departures from the martingale in mean property. The paper also analyzes several years of high frequency intra day commodity futures returns and...

In this paper we calculate the Italian Cities Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Composite Index potentially useful for policy analysis and dissemination of sustainable development at local level in Italy. Structured into several dimensions representing 16 out of 17 SDGs adopted by the United...

We develop a nonparametric regression-based goodness-of-fit test for multifactor continuous-time Markov models using the conditional characteristic function, which often has a convenient closed-form or can be approximated accurately for many popular continuous-time Markov models in economics...

Modeling conditional distributions in time series has attracted increasing attention in economics and finance. We develop a new class of generalized Cramer-von Mises (GCM) specification tests for time series conditional distribution models using a novel approach, which embeds the empirical...