This article considers effective Empirical Characteristic Function (ECF) methods for estimating parameters of affine diffusions with unobserved stochastic variance and their application to some problems of continuous-time Finance. We develop a new approach utilizing the Realized Variance (RV) in...

Based on a large panel of Czech manufacturing firms, we estimate firm-level production functions in 2003-2007 using the Levinsohn and Petrin (2003) and Wooldridge (2009) approaches, correcting for the measurement error in capital. We show that measurement error plays a significant role in the...

Despite the conflicting evidence provided by many of the recent studies on the sign and the direction of this relationship, the aim of the present paper is to explore how the interactions between oil price changes and stock returns of five developed countries namely U.S.A, Canada, Germany, Japan...

Pearson's system of continuous probability distributions is used herein to analyze return distributions of the shares in all companies listed on the Italian stock exchange. Results show that when finite time periods are examined, the type IV distribution describes the behavior of almost all...

The well-known SETAR model introduced by Tong belongs to the wide class of TAR models that may be specified in several different ways. Here we propose to consider the delay parameter as endogenous, that is we make it to depend on both the past value and the specific past regime of the series. In...

In this paper, we compare the performance of Inclan and Tiao's (IT) (1994) and Sanso, Arago and Carrion's (AIT) (2004) iterated cumulative sums of squares (ICSS) algorithms by means of Monte Carlo simulation experiments for various data-generating processes with conditional and unconditional...

Natural disasters have been a major cause of human suffering. Countries with higher income, lower inequality, lower corruption, and more democratic regimes have been found to experience less casualties from disasters. Government repression, however, could also play a role in disaster...

Interaction effects capture the impact of one explanatory variable x1 on the marginal effect of another explanatory variable x2. To explore interaction effects, so-called interaction terms x1x2 are typically included in estimation specifications. While in linear models the effect of a marginal...

A complete account of the U.S. child care subsidy system requires an understanding of its implications for both parental and child well-being. Although the effects of child care subsidies on maternal employment and child development have been recently studied, many other dimensions of family...

Recent empirical work indicates that, in a variety of financial markets, both conditional expectations and conditional variances of returns are time- varying. The purpose of this paper is to determine whether these joint fluctuations of conditional first and second moments are consistent with...