We examine two approaches characterized by different tail features to extract market expectations on the Mexican peso-US dollar exchange rate. Expectations are gauged by risk-neutral densities. The methods used to estimate these densities are the Volatility Function Technique (VFT) and the...

In this paper we introduce two general non-parametric first-order stationary time-series models for which marginal (invariant) and transition distributions are expressed as infinite-dimensional mixtures. That feature makes them the first Bayesian stationary fully non-parametric models developed...

We are interested in forecasting bankruptcies in a probabilistic way. Specifically, we compare the classification performance of several statistical and machine-learning techniques, namely discriminant analysis (Altman's Z-score), logistic regression, least-squares support vector machines and...

Financial advisors typically recommend that a long-term investor should hold a higher percentage of his wealth in stocks than a short-term investor. However, part of the academic literature disagrees with this advice. We use a spatial dominance test which is suited for comparing alternative...

This article examines changes in the exchange rate expectations associated with capital controls and banking regulations in a group of emerging countries that implemented these measures to control the adverse effects of sudden capital flows on their currencies. The evidence suggests that for...

We assume that some consistent estimator of an equilibrium relation between non-stationary fractionally integrated series is used in a first step to compute residuals (or differences thereof). We propose to apply the semiparametric log-periodogram regression to the (differenced) residuals in...

This study explores the reduction potential of greenhouse gases for major pollution emitting countries of the world using nonparametric productivity measurement methods and directional distance functions. In contrast to the existing literature we apply optimization methods to endogenously...

In this paper we present a new approach to evaluate the environmental efficiency of decision making units. We propose a model that describes a two-stage process consisting of a production and an end-of-pipe abatement stage with the environmental efficiency being determined by the efficiency of...

This study presents the results of an extensive Monte Carlo experiment to compare different methods of efficiency analysis. In addition to traditional parametric-stochastic and nonparametric-deterministic methods recently developed robust nonparametric-stochastic methods are considered. The...

This paper proposes a semiparametric approach by introducing a smooth scale function into the standard GARCH model so that conditional heteroskedasticity and scale change in a financial time series can be modelled simultaneously. An estimation procedure combining kernel estimation of the scale...