Beta-sorted portfolios - portfolios comprised of assets with similar covariation to selected risk factors - are a popular tool in empirical finance to analyze models of (conditional) expected returns. Despite their widespread use, little is known of their statistical properties in contrast to...

Partially linear semiparametric models are advantageous to use in empirical studies of various economic problems due to a special feature that allows the parametric and nonparametric components to exist simultaneously in the model. However, systematic estimation procedures and methods have not...

Tests for serial independence and goodness-of-fit based on divergence notions between probability distributions, such as the Kullback-Leibler divergence or Hellinger distance, have recently received much interest in time series analysis. The aim of this paper is to introduce tests for serial...

For numerous applications it is of interest to provide full probabilistic forecasts, which are able to assign probabilities to each predicted outcome. Therefore, attention is shifting constantly from conditional mean models to probabilistic distributional models capturing location, scale, shape...

Regression analyses of cross-country economic growth data are complicated by two main forms of model uncertainty: the uncertainty in selecting explanatory variables and the uncertainty in specifying the functional form of the regression function. Most discussions in the literature address these...

The problem of pricing Bermudan options using Monte Carlo and a nonparametric regression is considered. We derive optimal nonasymptotic bounds for a lower biased estimate based on the suboptimal stopping rule constructed using some estimates of continuation values. These estimates may be of...

In this work, we introduce a smoothed influence function that constitute a theoretical tool for studying the outliers robustness properties of a large class of nonparametric estimators. With this tool, we first show the nonrobustness of the Nadaraya-Watson estimator of regression. Then we show...

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...

In this paper we compare the in-sample fit and out-of-sample forecasting performance of no-arbitrage quadratic and essentially affine term structure models, as well as the dynamic Nelson-Siegel model. In total eleven model variants are evaluated, comprising five quadratic, four affine and two...

We study a Tikhonov Regularized (TiR) estimator of a functional parameter identified by conditional moment restrictions in a linear model with both exogenous and endogenous regressors. The nonparametric instrumental variable estimator is based on a minimum distance principle with penalization by...