The Pareto distribution is often used in many areas of economics to model the right tail of heavy-tailed distributions. However, the standard method of estimating the shape parameter (the Pareto index) of this distribution– the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) – is non-robust, in the sense...

A new version of the Q test, based on generalized residual correlations (i.e. auto-correlations and cross-correlations), is developed in this paper. The Q test fixes two main shortcomings of the Mcleod and Li Q (MLQ) test often used in the literature: (i) the test is capable to capture some...

In this paper we focus on the finite sample properties of the conditional least squares (CLS) method of threshold autoregressive (TAR) parameters under the following conditions: (a) non-Gaussian model innovations; (b) two types of asymmetry (i.e. deepness and steepness) captured by TAR models....

Financial returns exhibit common behavior described at best by factor models, but also fat tails, which may be captured by α-stable distributions. This paper concentrates on estimating factor models with multivariate α-stable distributed and independent factors and idiosyncratic noises under...

Measuring dynamic dependence between international financial markets has recently attracted great interest in financial econometrics because the observed correlations rose dramatically during the 2008–09 global financial crisis. Here, we propose a novel approach for measuring dependence...

In the present document it is exposed in an abstract way the models of credit portfolioes CreditMetricsTM, KMV, CreditRisk+, Credit Portfolio View in such a way that they could be calibrated and implemented in financial institutions where the quality and quantity of credit information is scanty,...

The most widely used measure of segregation is the dissimilarity index, D. It is now well understood that this measure also reflects randomness in the allocation of individuals to units; that is, it measures deviations from evenness not deviations from randomness. This leads to potentially large...

It has been found that the t-statistic for testing the null of no relationship between two independent variables diverges asymptotically under a wide variety of nonstationary data generating processes. This paper introduces a simple method which guarantees convergence of this t-statistic to a...

We derive analytic expressions for the biases, to O(n-1), of the maximum likelihood estimators of the parameters of the generalized Rayleigh distribution family. Using these expressions to bias-correct the estimators is found to be extremely effective in terms of bias reduction, and generally...

This paper is intended as a guide to statistical inference for loss distributions. There are three basic approaches to deriving the loss distribution in an insurance risk model: empirical, analytical, and moment based. The empirical method is based on a sufficiently smooth and accurate estimate...