It has long been known that the estimated persistence parameter in the GARCH(1,1) - model is biased upwards when the parameters of the model are not constant throughout the sample. The present paper explains the mechanics of this behavior for a particular class of estimates of the model...

We consider 1927 borrowers from 54 countries who had a credit rating by both Moody's and S&P at the end of 1998, and their subsequent default history up to the end of 2002. Viewing bond ratings as predicted probabilities of default, we consider partial orderings among competing probability...

For decades, there has been a heated debate about whether or not nuclear power plants contribute to childhood cancer in their respective neighbourhoods, with statisticians testifying on both sides. The present paper points to some flaws in the pro-arguments, taking a recent study prepared for...

We decompose the generalized Lorenz order into a size and a distribution component. The former is represented by stochastic dominance, the latter by the standard Lorenz order. We show that it is always possible, given generalized Lorenz dominance between two distributions F and G, to find...

We show that a recent appendix to the Gini-coefficient to make the latter more sensitive to asymmetric income distributions can be viewed as an abstract measure of skewness. We develop some of its properties and apply it to the US-income distribution in 1974 and 2010.

We show that the power of the KPSS-test against integration, as measured by divergence rates of the test statistic under the alternative, remains the same when residuals from an OLS-regression rather than true observations are used. This is in stark contrast to residual based tests of the null...

The article shows by various examples how consumers of statistical information may be confused when this information is presented in terms of conditional probabilities. It also shows how this confusion helps others to lie with statistics, and it suggests how either confusion or lies can be...

We investigate the effect of the 20 largest – in terms of insured losses – man-made or natural disasters on the insurance industry. We show via an event study that insurance markets worldwide are quite resilient to unexpected losses to capital and are even outperforming the general market...

The paper considers the Markov-Switching GARCH(1,1)-model with time-varying transition probabilities. It derives su?cient conditions for the square of the process to display long memory and provides some additional intuition for the empirical observation that estimated GARCH-parameters often sum...

We investigate the OLS-based estimator s2 of the disturbance variance in the standard linear regression model with cross section data when the disturbances are homoskedastic, but spatially correlated. For the most popular model of spatially autoregressive disturbances, we show that s2 can be...