Efficient estimation of the equity cost of operating public corporations is essential for a rational investment policy. Traditional OLS beta estimates of a single stock are known to suffer from violations of normality due to outliers – extreme returns caused by large, unpredictable...

We investigate the determinants of the banks' propensity to make long-term business loans in an emerging market context. Using a large sample of Russian banks, we find that the median bank allocates only 0.5% of its assets in long-term business loans and that there is wide cross-sectional...

Robust estimation techniques based on symmetric probability distributions are often substituted for OLS to obtain efficient regression parameters with thick-tail distributed data. The empirical, simulation and theoretical results in this paper show that with skewed distributed data, symmetric...

This paper provides a survey of three families of flexible parametric probability density functions (the skewed generalized t, the exponential generalized beta of the second kind, and the inverse hyperbolic sine distributions) which can be used in modeling a wide variety of econometric problems....

This paper discusses three families of flexible parametric probability density functions: the skewed generalized t, the exponential generalized beta of the second kind, and the inverse hyperbolic sin distributions. These families allow quite flexible modeling the first four moments of a...

This paper develops a skewed extension of the generalized t (GT) distribution, introduced by McDonald and Newey (1988). In particular, the paper derives the mathematical moments and other properties of the distribution and assesses its ability to fit the empirical distribution of several...