The so-called leverage hypothesis is that negative shocks to prices/ returns affect volatility more than equal positive shocks. Whether this is attributable to changing financial leverage is still subject to dispute but the terminology is in wide use. There are many tests of the leverage...

We examine a kernel regression smoother for time series that takes account of the error correlation structure as proposed by Xiao et al. (2008). We show that this method continues to improve estimation in the case where the regressor is a unit root or near unit root process.

Prominent asset pricing models imply a linear, time-invariant relation between the equity premium and its conditional variance. We propose an approach to estimating this relation that overcomes some of the limitations of the existing literature. First, we do not require any functional form...

For vectors z and w and scalar v, let r(v,z,w) be a function that can be nonparametrically estimated consistently and asymptotically normally, such as a distribution, density, or conditional mean regression function. We provide consistent, asymptotically normal nonparametric estimators for the...

This paper presents a weighted optimization framework that unifies the binary, multivalued, and continuous treatment - as well as mixture of discrete and continuous treatment - under a unconfounded treatment assignment. With a general loss function, the framework includes the average, quantile,...

We propose a new method of testing stochastic dominance that improves on existing tests based on the standard bootstrap or subsampling. The method admits prospects involving infinite as well as finite dimensional unknown parameters, so that the variables are allowed to be residuals from...

We propose a nonparametric test of conditional independence based on the empirical distribution function. The asymptotic null distribution is a mixture of chi-squares. A bootstrap procedure is proposed for calculating the critical values. Our test has power against alternatives at distance...

We propose a test of the hypothesis of stochastic monotonicity. This hypothesis isof interest in many applications. Our test is based on the supremum of a rescaledU-statistic. We show that its asymptotic distribution is Gumbel. The proof is difficultbecause the approximating Gaussian stochastic...