This paper examines a class of contractual relationships with specific investment, a non-durable trading opportunity, and renegotiation. FurtheringWatson’s (2007) line of analysis, trade actions are modeled as individual and trade-action-based option contracts are explored. Simple tools...

The quest for the ‘best’ heavy-tailed distribution for ARCH/GARCH residuals appears to still be ongoing. In this connection, we propose a new distribution that arises in a natural way as an outcome of an implicit model. The challenging application of prediction of squared returns is...

The bootstrap is an increasingly popular method for performing statistical inference. This paper provides the theoretical foundation for using the bootstrap as a valid tool of inference for quasi-maximum likelihood estimators (QMLE). We provide a unified framework for analyzing bootstrapped...

We review the notion of linearity of time series, and show that ARCH or stochastic volatility (SV) processes are not only non-linear: they are not even weakly linear, i.e., they do not even possess a martingale representation. Consequently, the use of Bartlett’s formula is unwarranted in...

Frequently, seasonal and non-seasonal data (especially macro time series) are observed with noise. For instance, the time series can have irregular abrupt changes and interruptions following as a result of additive or temporary change outliers caused by external circumstances which are...

The paper develops the Öxed-smoothing asymptotics in a two-step GMM framework. Under this type of asymptotics, the weighting matrix in the second-step GMM criterion function converges weakly to a random matrix and the two-step GMM estimator is asymptotically mixed normal. Nevertheless, the Wald...

The federal government offers an array of tax-based aid student aid programs designed to lower the cost of postsecondary attendance. Many taxpayers are eligible for more than one program, yet they are limited to one program per student per year. Analyzing a unique panel dataset of individual...

In the 2001 U.S. Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), 27% of households report simultaneously revolving significant credit card debt and holding sizeable amounts of liquid assets. These consumers report paying, on average, a 14% interest rate on their debt, while earning only 1 or 2% on their...

This paper develops a theoretical framework for studying contract and enforcement in settings with nondurable trading opportunities and complete but unverifiable information. The framework explicitly accounts for the parties’ individual trade actions. The sets of implementable...

We develop a new asymptotic theory for autocorrelation robust tests using a vector autoregressive (VAR) covariance matrix estimator. In contrast to the conventional asymptotics where the VAR order goes to infinity but at a slower rate than the sample size, wehave the VAR order grow at the...