The German potable water supply industry is regarded highly fragmented, thus preventing efficiency improvements that could happen through consolidation. Focusing on a hypothetical restructuring of the industry, we use a cross-section sample of 364 German water utilities in 2006, applying Data...

Portfolio sorting is ubiquitous in the empirical finance literature, where it has been widely used to identify pricing anomalies in different asset classes. Despite the popularity of portfolio sorting, little attention has been paid to the statistical properties of the procedure or to the...

We consider a new procedure for detecting structural breaks in mean for high- dimensional time series. We target breaks happening at unknown time points and locations. In particular, at a fixed time point our method is concerned with either the biggest break in one location or aggregating...

We study the asymptotic properties of a Tikhonov Regularized (TiR) estimator of a functional parameter based on a minimum distance principle for nonparametric conditional moment restrictions. The estimator is computationally tractable and takes a closed form in the linear case. We derive its...

In this paper we provide a convenient econometric framework for the analy-sis of nonlinear dependence in financial applications. We introduce models withconstrained nonparametric dependence, which specify the conditional distrib-ution or the copula in terms of a one-dimensional functional...