Much of the trading activity in Equity markets is directed to brokerage houses. In exchange they provide so-called quot;soft dollarsquot; which basically are amounts spent in quot;researchquot; for identifying profitable trading opportunities. Soft dollars represent about USD 1 out of every USD...

Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) is a data anylsis procedure that is widely used in social and behavioral sciences in general and other applied sciences that deal with large quantities of data (variables). The classical estimator (and inference) procedures are based either on the maximum...

For manifest variables with additive noise and for a given number of latent variables with an assumed distribution, we propose to nonparametrically estimate the association between latent and manifest variables. Our estimation is a two step procedure: first it employs standard factor analysis to...