Thesis (PhD (Statistics and Actuarial Science))--University of Stellenbosch, 2011.

We analyze the transmission of structural shocks between the US and the euro area within a two-country VAR framework. For that purpose, we simultaneously identify cost-push, demand and monetary policy shocks for both countries using sign restrictions. Our results show that domestic shocks...

A local linear estimator of generalized impulse response (GIR) functions for nonlinear conditional heteroskedastic autoregressive processes is derived and shown to be asymptotically normal. A plug-in bandwidth is obtained that minimizes the asymptotical mean squared error of the GIR estimator. A...

In this paper, linear errors-in-response models are considered in the presence of validation data on the responses. A semiparametric dimension reduction technique is employed to define an estimator of Ø with asymptotic normality, the estimated empirical loglikelihoods and the adjusted empirical...

Applied researchers often need to estimate confidence intervals for functions of parameters, such as the effects of counterfactual policy changes. If the function is continuously differentiable and has non-zero and bounded derivatives, then they can use the delta method. However, if the function...

This dissertation is a collection of three essays that cover issues in poverty analysis. The first essay (Partial Identification of PovertyMeasures with Contaminated and Corrupted Data) applies a partial identification approach to poverty measurement when data errors arenon-classical in the...

State price densities (SPD) are an important element in applied quantitative finance. In a Black-Scholes model they are lognormal distributions with constant volatility parameter. In practice volatility changes and the distribution deviates from log-normality. We estimate SPDs using EUREX option...

The state price density is a second derivative of the discounted European options prices with respect to the strike price. We use Maximum Likelihood method to derive a simple estimator of the curve such that it is decreasing, convex and its second derivative integrates to one. Confidence...

According to the Purchasing Power Parity {(PPP)} theory, real exchange rate fluctuations are mainly caused by transitory shocks. The theory fits well one empirical feature of the data, namely the short-run volatility of real exchange rates, but also implies that shocks should die away in one to...