We derive nonparametric tests of symmetry using asymmetric kernels with either shrinking or fixed bandwidths. We show how to extend the approach to examine conditional symmetry by deriving conditions under which our tests are applicable to residuals from semiparametric models with a...

This paper explores the statistical properties of household consumption-expenditure budget share distributions defined as the share of household total expenditure spent for purchasing a specific category of commodities for a large sample of Italian households in the period 1989-2004. We find...

This paper explores the statistical properties of household consumption-expenditure budget shares distributions (HBSDs) - defined as the share of household total expenditure spent for purchasing a specific category of commodities - for a large sample of Italian households in the period...

This paper explores the statistical properties of household consumption-expenditure budget shares distributions (HBSDs) defined as the share of household total expenditure spent for purchasing a specific category of commodities for a large sample of Italian households in the period 1989-2004. We...

We revisit the apparent historical success of technical trading rules on daily prices of the DJIA index from 1897 to 2011, and use the False Discovery Rate as a new approach to data snooping. The advantage of the FDR over existing methods is that it selects more outperforming rules which allows...

We develop an econometric methodology to infer the path of risk premia from large unbalanced panel of individual stock returns. We estimate the time-varying risk premia implied by conditional linear asset pricing models where the conditioning includes instruments common to all assets and asset...

Testing procedures for predictive regressions with lagged autoregressive variables imply a suboptimal inference in presence of small violations of ideal assumptions. We propose a novel testing framework resistant to such violations, which is consistent with nearly integrated regressors and...

This note discusses some problems possibly arising when approximating via MonteCarlo simulations the distributions of goodness-of-fit test statistics based on the empirical distribution function. We argue that failing to reestimate unknown parameters on each simulated Monte-Carlo sample - and...

In this paper we explore the statistical properties of the distributions of consumption expenditures for a large sample of Italian households in the period 1989-2004. Goodness-of-fit tests show that household aggregate (and age-conditioned) consumption distributions are not log-normal. Rather,...