Because of a long time frame, irreversible and specific investments, incomplete contracts andpolitical constraints, it is generally difficult for governments to commit themselves in a credibleway to a fixed petroleum tax regime. Many controversial renegotiations and tightenings of suchsystems...

Topical issues in petroleum tax design are in this chapter discussed by means of a tax model for anet income tax system (Norway) and a representative PSA regime. We analyse the entire lifecycle of a typical petroleum project, i.e., the exploration decision is included. Many petroleumtax systems...

Shortages of rigs and personnel have encouraged creativity in designing incentive contracts in thedrilling sector. In particular for oil service contracts, since those companies have the most directcontrol of drilling efficiency. A large variety of contract types are in use, including within...

The oil companies are concerned to replace the petroleum reserves they producein order to maintain their future level of activity. Booked reserves alsorepresent an important input when analysts value these companies. Many producercountries want to control their own resources, a goal which can...

Ambiguity, also called Knightian or model uncertainty, is a key feature in financial modeling. A recent paper by Maccheroni et al. (2004) characterizes investorpreferences under aversion against both risk and ambiguity. Their result shows that these preferences can be numerically represented in...

Robust utility functionals arise as numerical representations of investor preferences, when the investor is uncertain about the underlying probabilistic model and averse against both risk and model uncertainty. In this paper, we study the duality theory for the problem of maximizing the robust...

This paper provides a new approach to testing cointegration parameters in a singleequationcointegration environment. The novelty is in improving over the well-knownheteroscedasticity and autocorrelation consistent (HAC) robust standard errors usingfixed bandwidth (fixed-b) asymptotic theory and...

We derive nonparametric tests of symmetry using asymmetric kernels with either shrinkingor fixed bandwidths. We show how to extend the approach to examine conditional symmetry byderiving conditions under which our tests are applicable to residuals from semiparametric modelswith a (sufficiently...

Many statistical applications require an estimate of a covariance matrix and/or its inverse.When the matrix dimension is large compared to the sample size, which happensfrequently, the sample covariance matrix is known to perform poorly and may suffer fromill-conditioning. There already exists...

In this paper, we investigate the asymmetry in the tail dependence between USequity portfolios and the aggregate US market. Given the limited number of ob-servations in the tails of a joint distribution, standard non-parametric measures oftail dependence often have poor nite-sample properties....