Our paper empirically investigates the structure of transport costs for interregional trade, by using the micro-data of freight charge. We focus on road transport, reflecting the fact that trucking has a dominant share in transporting goods between regions in many countries (in Japan, 91.2% of...

This note examines testing methods for Paretoness in the framework of rank-size rule regression. Rank-size rule regression describes a relationship found in the analysis of various topics such as city population, words in texts, scale of companies and so on. In terms of city population, it is...

This paper presents an approach to measuring the values of time cost for freight transportation, and examines its applicability through empirical analysis. We develop the method based on the hedonic approach by explicitly formulating how transport time is determined as market outcome. In the...

Estimation of integrated multivariate volatilities of an Ito process is an interesting and important issue in finance, for example, in order to evaluate portfolios. New non-parametric estimators have been recently proposed by Malliavin and Mancino (2002) and Hayashi and Yoshida (2005a) as...

Since the pioneering work by Granger (1969), many authors have proposed tests of causality between economic time series. Most of them are concerned only with “linear causality in mean”, or if a series linearly affects the (conditional) mean of the other series. It is no doubt of primary...

A new type of bank regulatory capital, known as contingent capital, has emerged in tandem with discussions on the BASEL III regulatory framework but there is a lack of consensus on a standard valuation approach among those proposed so far. We think that the practical solution is to be able to...

In a number of semiparametric models, smoothing seems necessary in order to obtain estimates of the parametric component which are asymptotically normal and converge at parametric rate. However, smoothing can inflate the error in the normal approximation, so that refined approximations are of...

For some popular financial continuous-time models, tractable expressions of likelihood functions are unknown. For that reason, the maximum likelihood estimation method is infeasible. Fortunately, closed functional forms of conditional characteristic functions of some of these models are known....

This note considers a puzzling phenomenon that is observed in some semiparametric estimation problems. In some cases, using estimated values of the nuisance parameters provides a more efficient estimator for the parameters of interest than does using the true values. This phenomenon takes place...