In this paper, we propose a new method to assess the impact of sovereign ratings on sovereign bond yields. We estimate the impulse response of the interest rate, following a change in the rating. Since ratings are ordinal and moreover extremely persistent, it proves difficult to estimate those...

We provide a method for distinguishing long-range dependence from deterministic trends such as structural breaks. The method is based on the comparison of standard log-periodogram regression estimation of the memory parameter with its tapered counterpart. The difference of these estimators...

Financial advisors typically recommend that a long-term investor should hold a higher percentage of his wealth in stocks than a short-term investor. However, part of the academic literature disagrees with this advice. We use a spatial dominance test which is suited for comparing alternative...

We propose a specification test for a wide range of parametric models for the conditional distribution function of an outcome variable given a vector of covariates. The test is based on the Cramer-von Mises distance between an unrestricted estimate of the joint distribution function of the data,...

We develop a general class of nonparametric tests for treatment effects conditional on covariates. We consider a wide spectrum of null and alternative hypotheses regarding conditional treatment effects, including (i) the null hypothesis of the conditional stochastic dominance between treatment...

Pearson's correlation coefficient is typically used for measuring the dependence structure of stock returns. Nevertheless, it has many shortcomings often documented in the literature. We suggest to use a conditional version of Spearman's rho as an alternative dependence measure. Our approach is...

We extend the paper of Hinloopen and van Marrewijk (2005), who introduce the harmonic mass index to test whether two samples come from the same distribution, in the following directions. Firstly, we derive the Harmonic Weighted Mass (HWM) index for any number of samples. Secondly, this paper...

Financial advisors typically recommend that a long-term investor should hold a higher percentage of his wealth in stocks than a short-term investor. However, part of the academic literature disagrees with this advice. We use a spatial dominance test which is suited for comparing alternative...

We propose a specification test for a wide range of parametric models for the conditional distribution function of an outcome variable given a vector of covariates. The test is based on the Cramer-von Mises distance between an unrestricted estimate of the joint distribution function of the data,...

We propose a quantification of the p-p plot that assigns equal weight to all distances between the respective distributions: the surface between the p-p plot and the diagonal. This surface is labelled the Harmonic Weighted Mass (HWM) index. We introduce the diagonal-deviation (d-d) plot that...