The main goal of this paper is to better understand the behavior of credit spreads in the past and the potential risk of unexpected future credit spread changes. One important consideration to note regarding credit spreads is the fact that bond spreads contain a liquidity premium, which...

We perform an extensive series of Monte Carlo experiments to compare the performance of two variants of the "Jackknife Instrumental Variables Estimator," or JIVE, with that of the more familiar 2SLS and LIML estimators. We find no evidence to suggest that JIVE should ever be used. It is always...

In this paper we develop a structural equation model with latent variables in an ordinal setting which allows us to test broker-dealer predictive ability of financial market movements. We use a multivariate logit model in a latent factor framework, develop a tractable estimator based on a...

High breakdown-point regression estimators protect against large errors and data contamination. We adapt and generalize the concept of trimming used by many of these robust estimators so that it can be employed in the context of the generalized method of moments. The proposed generalized method...

This article investigates power and size of some tests for exogeneity of a binary explanatory variable in count models by conducting extensive Monte Carlo simulations. The tests under consideration are Hausman contrast tests as well as univariate Wald tests, including a new test of notably easy...

Macroeconomic time series often involve a threshold effect in their ARMA representation, and exhibit long memory features. In this paper we introduce a new class of threshold ARFIMA models to account for this. The threshold effect is introduced in the autoregressive and/or the fractional...

For testing normality we investigate the power of several tests, first of all, the well known test of Jarque and Bera (1980) and furthermore the tests of Kuiper (1960) and Shapiro and Wilk (1965) as well as tests of Kolmogorov-Smirnov and Cramer-von Mises type. The tests on normality are based,...

Item response theory is one of the modern test theories with applications in educational and psychological testing. Recent developments made it possible to characterize some desired properties in terms of a collection of manifest ones, so that hypothesis tests on these traits can, in principle,...

A test for serial independence is proposed which is related to the BDS test but focuses on tail event probabilities rather than probabilities near the center of the distribution. The motivation behind this approach is to obtain a test more suitable for detecting structure in the tails, such as...

This paper investigates by means of Monte Carlo techniques the robustness of the CUSUM and CUSUM-of-squares tests (Brown et al., 1975) to serial correlation, endogeneity and lack of structural invariance. Our findings suggest that these tests perform better in the context of a dynamic model of...