We consider in this paper the interaction between precautionary savings and insurance demand. Under the standard intertemporal expected utility framework, the effect of an increase in the concavity of the utility function is ambiguous because of the inability of this framework to distinguish...

The authors examine the ability of economic models with regime shifts to rationalize and explain the risk-aversion and pricing-kernel puzzles put forward in Jackwerth (2000). They build an economy where investors' preferences or economic fundamentals are state-dependent, and simulate prices for...

This article deals with the estimation of continuous-time stochastic volatility models of option pricing. We argue that option prices are much more informative about the parameters than are asset prices. This is confirmed in a Monte Carlo experiment that compares two very simple strategies based...

An inference method, called latent backfitting, is proposed. This method appears well suited for econometric models where the structural relationships of interest define the observed endogenous variables as a known function of unobserved state variables and unknown parameters. This nonlinear...

Indirect Inference (I-I) estimation of structural parameters θ requires matching observed and simulated statistics, which are most often generated using an auxiliary model that depends on instrumental parameters Ø. The estimators of the instrumental parameters will encapsulate the...