This paper is motivated by our attempt to answer an empirical question: how is private health insurance take-up in Australia affected by the income threshold at which the Medicare Levy Surcharge (MLS) kicks in? We propose a new difference de-convolution kernel estimator for the location and size...

We develop a new parameter stability test against the alternative of observation driven generalized autoregressive score dynamics. The new test generalizes the ARCH-LM test of Engle (1982) to settings beyond time-varying volatility and exploits any autocorrelation in the likelihood scores under...

On purpose to extract trend and cycle from a time series many competing techniques have been developed. The probably most prevalent is the Hodrick Prescott filter. However this filter suffers from diverse shortcomings, especially the subjective choice of its penalization parameter. To this point...

This paper is concerned with problem of variable selection and forecasting in the presence of parameter instability. There are a number of approaches proposed for forecasting in the presence of breaks, including the use of rolling windows or exponential down-weighting. However, these studies...

When in proxy-SVARs the covariance matrix of VAR disturbances is subject to exogenous, permanent, nonrecurring breaks that generate target impulse response functions (IRFs) that change across volatility regimes, even strong, exogenous external instruments can result in inconsistent estimates of...

What does the saving-investment (SI) relation really measure and how should the SI relation be measured? These are two of the most discussed issues triggered by the so called Feldstein-Horioka puzzle. Based on panel data we introduce a new variant of functional coefficient models that allows to...

Currently available asymptotic results in the literature suggest that matching estimators have higher variance than reweighting estimators. The extant literature comparing the finite sample properties of matching to specific reweighting estimators, however, has concluded that reweighting...

We introduce a new hybrid approach to joint estimation of Value at Risk (VaR) and Expected Shortfall (ES) for high quantiles of return distributions. We investigate the relative performance of VaR and ES models using daily returns for sixteen stock market indices (eight from developed and eight...

A procedure for testing the signicance of a subset of explanatory variables in a nonparametric regression is proposed. Our test statistic uses the kernel method. Under the null hypothesis of no effect of the variables under test, we show that our test statistic has a nhp2/2 standard normal...