This paper applies an intuitive approach based on stock market data to a unique dataset of large concentrations during the period 1990-2002 to assess the effectiveness of European merger control. The basic idea is to relate announcement and decision abnormal returns. Under a set of four...

Asymptotic and bootstrap tests are studied for testing whether there is a relation of stochastic dominance between two distributions. These tests have a null hypothesis of nondominance, with the advantage that, if this null is rejected, then all that is left is dominance. This also leads us to...

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...

The cumulants of the quadratic forms associated to the so-called spatial design matrices are often needed for inference in the context of isotropic processes on uniform grids. Unfortunately, because the eigenvalues of the matrices involved are generally unknown, the computation of the cumulants...

This paper proposes a variant of the classical HAUSMAN specification test commonly employed to decide whether the estimation of a random-effects model is a viable alternative to estimating fixed effects. Whereas the classical test probes the equality of fixed- and random effects, the proposed...

We revisit the apparent historical success of technical trading rules on daily prices of the DJIA index from 1897 to 2011, and use the False Discovery Rate as a new approach to data snooping. The advantage of the FDR over existing methods is that it selects more outperforming rules which allows...

This paper develops a simple technique that controls for ldquo;false discoveries,rdquo; or mutual funds that exhibit significant alphas by luck alone. Our approach precisely separates funds into (1) unskilled, (2) zero-alpha, and (3) skilled funds, even with dependencies in cross-fund estimated...

In the context of modern portfolio theory, we compare the out-of-sample performance of 8 investment strategies which are based on statistical methods with the out-of-sample performance of a family of trivial strategies. A wide range of approaches is considered in this work, including the...

This paper investigates a selection of methods disentangling contributions from price jumps to realized variance. Flat prices (consecutively sampled prices in calendar time with the same value) and no trading (no price observation at sampling points), both frequently occurring stylized facts in...

At least since [1], a broad class of multiple comparison procedures, so-called simultaneous test procedures (STPs), is established in the statistical literature. Elements of an STP are a testing family, consisting of a set of null hypotheses and corresponding test statistics, and a common...