The empirical joint distribution of return-pairs on stock indices displays high tail-dependence in the lower tail and low tail-dependence in the upper tail. The presence of tail-dependence is not compatible with the assumption of (conditional) joint normality. The presence of asymmetric-tail...

Significant departures from log normality are observed in income data, in violation of Gibrat’s law. We identify a new empirical regularity, which is that the distribution of consumption expenditures across households is, within cohorts, closer to log normal than the distribution of income. We...

We find a U-shaped relation between happiness and religiosity in cross-country panel data after controlling for income levels. At a given level of income, the same level of happiness can be reached with high and low levels of religiosity, but not with intermediate levels. A rise in income causes...

The class of new worse/better than used in expectation on average (NWUEA/NBUEA) distributions is proposed. It is defined by the requirement that for each age t a weighted average of mean residual lives be greater/smaller than the life expectancy at birth. The weights are the shares of ages up to...

We estimate time series of option implied Probabilities of Default (PoDs) for 19 major US financial institutions from 2002 to 2012. These PoDs are estimated as mass points of entropy based risk neutral densities and subsequently corrected for maturity dependence. The ob- tained time series are...

In this paper we 'update' the option implied probability of default (option iPoD) approach recently suggested in the literature. First, a numerically more stable objective function for the estimation of the risk neutral density is derived whose integrals can be solved analytically. Second, it is...

To assess the effects of the EMU on inflation rate dynamics of its member states, the inflation rate series for 21 European countries are investigated for structural changes. To capture changes in mean, variance, and skewness of inflation rates, a generalized logistic model is adopted and...

In this paper we consider daily financial data from various sources (stock market indices, foreign exchange rates and bonds) and analyze their multi-scaling properties by estimating the parameters of a Markov-switching multifractal model (MSM) with Lognormal volatility components. In order to...

This paper provides a survey of three families of flexible parametric probability density functions (the skewed generalized t, the exponential generalized beta of the second kind, and the inverse hyperbolic sine distributions) which can be used in modeling a wide variety of econometric problems....

The paper proposes a technique to jointly tests for groupings of unknown size in the cross sectional dimension of a panel and estimates the parameters of each group, and applies it to identifying convergence clubs in income per-capita. The approach uses the predictive density of the data,...