The paper develops an approach for analyzing the dynamics of a nonlinear time series that is represented by a nonparametric estimate of its one-step ahead conditional density. The approach entails examination of conditional moment profiles corresponding to certain shocks; a conditional moment...

This dissertation consists of three related chapters that study financial market volatility,jumps and the economic factors behind them. Each of the chapters analyzes adifferent aspect of this problem.The first chapter examines tests for jumps based on recent asymptotic results.Monte Carlo...

estimates and examines the empirical plausibility of asset pricing models that attempt to explain features of financial markets such as the size of the equity premium and the volatility of the stock market. In one model, the long-run risks (LRR) model of Bansal and Yaron, low-frequency...

describes the use of the Gallant-Tauchen efficient method of moments (EMM) technique for diagnostic checking of stochastic differential equations (SDEs) estimated from financial market data. The EMM technique is a simulation-based method that uses the score function of an auxiliary model as the...

A common model for security price dynamics is the continuous-time stochastic volatility model. For this model, Hull and White (1987) show that the price of a derivative claim is the conditional expectation of the Black-Scholes price with the forward integrated variance replacing the...

This paper evaluates the role of various volatility specifications, such as multiple stochastic volatility (SV) factors and jump components, in appropriate modeling of equity return distributions. We use estimation technology that facilitates nonnested model comparisons and use a long data set...

This dissertation consists of three essays, first two of which consider a new estimation method of dynamic panel data models and the last one considers an application of these models. The first essay (Chapter 1) offers empirical likelihood (EL) estimation of dynamic panel data models, which...

This thesis builds a stochastic volatility model for the term structure of interest rates, which is also known as the dynamics of the yield curve. The main purpose of the model is to propose a parsimonious and plausible approach to capture some characteristics that conform to some empirical...