We propose a simple model, based on Monte Carlo simulations, for studying the effects of changes in the environment on the adaptation and extinction of evolving species. We show that the geological data of climatic changes are well described by Levy-stable distributions. This leads, in our...

Volatility measuring and estimation based on intra-day high-frequency data has grown in popularity during the last few years. A significant part of the research uses volatility and variance measures based on the sum of squared high-frequency returns. These volatility measures, introduced and...

Consider a setting where a treatment that starts at some point during a spell (e.g. in unemployment) may impact on the hazard rate of the spell duration, and where the impact may be heterogeneous across subjects. We provide Monte Carlo evidence on the feasibility of estimating the distribution...

It is common in applied econometrics to test the null hypothesis of a level-stationary process against the alternative of a unit root process. We show that the use of conventional asymptotic critical values for the stationarity tests of Kwiatkowski et al. (1992) and Leybourne and McCabe (1994)...

In this article, we compare the performance of Hodrickk-Prescott and Baxter-King filters with a method of filtering based on the multi-resolution properties of wavelets. We show that overall the three methods remain comparable if the theoretical cyclical component is defined in the usual...

An urban infrastructure or re-qualification project (such as the building of a hospital, school, and so on) in greenfield site, brownfield site or inner-city can change the socio-economic context of the interested zone so that the value of non-building lands substantially increase. Owning or...

This paper investigates potential contagion among the major financial institutions in developed economies. Using Credit Default Swaps (CDS) premia as a measure of credit or counterparty risk, our analysis focuses on the extreme co-movements of Financial Institutions' default contracts during the...

In this article, we consider the estimation of semiparametric panel data smooth coefficient models. We propose a class of local generalized method of moments (LGMM) estimators that are simple and easy to implement in practice. We show that the proposed LGMM estimators are consistent and...

In this paper we apply fuzzy set theory to the portfolio optimization of power generation assets, using a semi-mean absolute deviation (SMAD) model as a benchmark and a fuzzy semi-mean absolute deviation (FSMAD) model for comparison. The two models are applied to five onshore wind power plants...

In this paper, we run a Monte Carlo analysis of the finite-sample performance of an Information Matrix Test put forward by Smith (1985) for bivariate censored models. We use the bivariate probit model and Heckman selection model as examples.;Approximating the finite-sample distribution of this...