Model risk as part of the operational risk is a serious problem for financial institutions.As the pricing of derivatives as well as the computation of the marketor credit risk of an institution depend on statistical models the application of awrong model can lead to a serious over- or...

This paper revisits the performance of frequently used risk forecasting methods, such as the Value-at-Risk models. The aim is to analyze its performance, and mitigate its pitfalls by incorporating conditional variance estimates, as generated by a GARCH model. Notably, this paper tests several...

When decomposing differences in average economic outcome between two groups of individuals, it is common practice to base the analysis on logarithms if the dependent variable is nonnegative. This paper argues that this approach raises a number of undesired statistical and conceptual issues...

This note explores the robustness of Hamilton's (Econometrica, 1989) two-regime Markov switching model framework for capturing business-cycle patterns. Applying his exact specification to a revised version of real GNP, I find parameter estimates that are similar to those he reported only when I...

Backtesting methods are statistical tests designed to uncover excessive risk-taking from financial institutions. We show in this paper that these methods are subject to the presence of model risk produced by a wrong specification of the conditional VaR model, and derive its effect on the...

US firm cash holdings have become increasingly concentrated over time withering shareholder returns and heightening agency problems associated with free cash flows. Our use of a robust regression technique (LAD) and a state-of-the-art variable selection procedure (LASSO) to identify the...

Production capital and technology, fundamental to understanding output and productivity growth, are unobserved except at disaggregated levels and must be estimated prior to being used in empirical analysis. We develop and apply a new estimation method, based on advances in economics, statistics,...

In many economic models a central variable of interest is lifetime or permanent income which is not observed in survey data sets and typically proxied by annual income information. To assess the quality of such approximations, we use a unique source of lifetime earnings - the German pension...

There is increasing demand for models of time-varying and non-Gaussian dependencies for mul- tivariate time-series. Available models suffer from the curse of dimensionality or restrictive assumptions on the parameters and the distribution. A promising class of models are the hierarchical...

This paper proposes a novel instrumental variable method for program evaluation that only requires a single cross-section of data on the spatial intensity of programs and outcomes. The instruments are derived from a simple theoretical model of government decision-making in which governments are...