New macro empirical evidence is provided to assess the relative importance of object and idea gaps in explaining the world income distribution dynamics. Formal statistical hypothesis tests allow us to discriminate between two competing growthmodels: (i) the standard neoclassical growth model...

Funds of Hedge Funds (FoHFs) are often thought to have excess skewness relative to the S&P 500. We illustrate by means of novel econometric methods that this arises because of a buy-and-hold strategy with respect to underlying hedge funds, which exhibit excess skewness with respect to the...

Multidimensional poverty measures give rise to a host of statistical hypotheses which are of interest to applied economists and policy-makers alike. In the specific context of the generalized Alkire-Foster (Alkire and Foster 2008) class of measures, we show that many of these hypotheses can be...

We assess the out-of-sample performance of Bitcoin within portfolios of various asset classes and a well-diversified portfolio employing standard metrics under four strategies. Most importantly, we show the value-added net of transaction costs. Our findings suggest significant diversification...

Controlling for the data-snooping bias, this study aims to identify all outperformers for periods prior to the outbreak of the sub-prime mortgage crisis and to test if any of these in-sample ‘real' top hedge funds survived this credit crunch during the Jul. 2007 to Aug. 2008 (out-of-sample)...

In this paper, the optimality of bivariate copula-VaR models and the usefulness of several goodness-of-fit tests for copulas are analysed in a comprehensive empirical study using data for stocks, commodities and FX futures. In particular, I try to answer two questions: (1) Which parametric...

In communities highly dependent on rain fed agriculture for their livelihoods, the common occurrence of climatic shocks such as droughts can lower the opportunity cost of having children, and raise fertility. Using longitudinal household data from Madagascar, we estimate the causal effect of...

This paper generalizes the approach of Zhou, van den Akker, Werker (2019), which was designed to derive semiparametric power envelope and construct efficient rank-based tests for the univariate unit root testing problem. The generalization is threefold. First, it becomes a unified method...

The impact of Bitcoin futures introduction on the underlying Bitcoin volatility has been a controversial topic. Conflicting results had been obtained with different sample periods and methodologies. To address this debate, this study examines the impacts of Bitcoin futures trading on spot market...

The goal of this paper is to search for conclusive evidence against the stationarity of the global air surface temperature, which is one of the most important indicators of climate change. For this purpose, possible long-range dependencies are investigated in the frequency-domain. Since...