This paper applies a local-linear non-parametric kernel regression technique to examine the effect of macroeconomic factors on stock market performance in Ghana. We show that the popular parametric specification in the existing literature suffers from functional misspecification. The evidence...

Sellers of variance swaps earn time-varying risk premia for their exposure to realized variance, the level of variance swap rates, and the slope of the variance swap curve. To measure risk premia, we estimate a dynamic term structure model that decomposes variance swap rates into expected...

We develop and implement methods for determining whether introducing new securities or relaxing investment constraints improves the investment opportunity set for prospect investors. We formulate a new testing procedure for prospect spanning for two nested portfolio sets based on subsampling and...

We propose a nonparametric method to test which characteristics provide independent information for the cross section of expected returns. We use the adaptive group LASSO to select characteristics and to estimate how they affect expected returns nonparametrically. Our method can handle a large...

We introduce econometric methods to perform estimation and inference on the permanent and transitory components of the stochastic discount factor (SDF) in dynamic Markov environments. The approach is nonparametric in that it does not impose parametric restrictions on the law of motion of the...

Expected Shortfall (ES) is the average return on a risky asset conditional on the return being below some quantile of its distribution, namely its Value-at-Risk (VaR). The Basel III Accord, which will be implemented in the years leading up to 2019, places new attention on ES, but unlike VaR,...

We consider the problem of estimating the conditional quantile of a time series fYtg at time t given covariates Xt, where Xt can ei- ther exogenous variables or lagged variables of Yt . The conditional quantile is estimated by inverting a kernel estimate of the conditional distribution function,...

In this paper, we extend the parametric, asymmetric, stochastic volatility model (ASV), where returns are correlated with volatility, by flexibly modeling the bivariate distribution of the return and volatility innovations nonparametrically. Its novelty is in modeling the joint, conditional,...

The basic model for high-frequency data in finance is considered, where an efficient price process is observed under microstructure noise. It is shown that this nonparametric model is in Le Cam's sense asymptotically equivalent to a Gaussian shift experiment in terms of the square root of the...