Accurate prediction of the frequency of extreme events is of primary importance in many financial applications such as Value-at-Risk (VaR) analysis. We propose a semi-parametric method for VaR evaluation. The largest risks are modelled parametrically, while smaller risks are captured by the non-...

A simple auction-theoretic framework is used to examine symmetric litigation environments where the legal ownership of a disputed asset is unknown to the court. The court observes only the quality of the case presented by each party, and awards the asset to the party presenting the best case....

This paper reconsiders Tullock's analysis of rent seeking and wasteful overdissipation. The purpose of this paper is to point out that even though his original analysis of overdissipation is technically flawed, the definition of overdissipation can be modified to explain instances in which...

This paper provides evidence that the choice of the foreign exchange regime is not of first order importance for achieving high output growth. It is argued that due to the forward looking nature of the foreign exchange market, exchange rate stability hinges on the current and anticipated...

Market efficiency tests that rely on the martingale difference be-havior of returns can be based on various volatility measures. This paper argues that, to be able to differentiate between dependence and fat-tailedness. one should look simultaneously at plots based on ab-solute returns and...

The creeping stock market collapse eroded the wealth of funded pension systems. This led to political tensions between generations due to the fuzzy definition of property rights on the pension funds wealth. We argue that this problem can best be resolved by the introduction of generational...

This paper presents a unified framework for characterizing symmetric equilibrium in simultaneous move, two-player, rank-order contests with complete information, in which each player's strategy generates direct or indirect affine "spillover" effects that depend on the rank-order of her decision...

Economic problems such as large claims analysis in insurance and value-at-risk in finance, requireassessment of the probability P of extreme realizations Q. This paper provided a semi-parametricmethod for estimation of extreme (P, Q) combinations for data with heavy tails. We solve the...