This paper shows that the Fed reacts to change in spreads between corporate bond yields and government bond yields over and beyond their information content on future inflation and future activity. This result, obtained in a GMM framework, is confirmed by simulation methods. Moreover, when...

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...

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...

The volatility implied by observed market prices as a function of the strike and time to maturity form an Implied Volatility Surface (IVS). Practical applications require reducing the dimension and characterize its dynamics through a small number of factors. Such dimension reduction is...

Accurate credit-granting decisions are crucial to the efficiency of the decentralized capital allocation mechanisms in modern market economies. Credit bureaus and many financial institutions have developed and used credit-scoring models to standardize and automate, to the extent possible, credit...

A large part of the recent literature on program evaluation has focused on estimation of the average effect of the treatment under assumptions of unconfoundedness or ignorability following the seminal work by Rubin (1974) and Rosenbaum and Rubin (1983). In many cases however, researchers are...

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...

This paper studies the performance of nonparametric quantile regression as a tool to predict Value at Risk (VaR). The approach is flexible as it requires no assumptions on the form of return distributions. A monotonized double kernel local linear estimator is applied to estimate moderate (1%)...

We consider problems in modelling job-matching in the Czech Republic during the transition to a market economy. Special interest is devoted to functional form considerations and the analysis of returns to scale of the matching function. This explorative study aims to shed some light into the...