Portfolio sorting is ubiquitous in the empirical finance literature, where it has been widely used to identify pricing anomalies in different asset classes. Despite the popularity of portfolio sorting, little attention has been paid to the statistical properties of the procedure or to the...

Standard fixed symmetric kernel type density estimators are known to encounter problems for positive random variables with a large probability mass close to zero. We show that in such settings, alternatives of asymmetric gamma kernel estimators are superior but also differ in asymptotic and...

This chapter surveys recent econometric methodologies for inference in large dimensional conditional factor models in finance. Changes in the business cycle and asset characteristics induce time variation in factor loadings and risk premia to be accounted for. The growing trend in the use of...

We develop tests for deciding whether a large cross‐section of asset prices obey an exact factor structure at the times of factor jumps. Such jump dependence is implied by standard linear factor models. Our inference is based on a panel of asset returns with asymptotically increasing...

We examine which factor model best captures systematic return covariation by focusing on the economic implications for portfolio risk control. The pairwise variance equality test and the model confidence set procedure suggest that the Fama and French (2015) five-factor model, the Barillas and...

Dimension reduction techniques for functional data analysis model and approximate smooth random functions by lower dimensional objects. In many applications the focus of interest lies not only in dimension reduction but also in the dynamic behaviour of the lower dimensional objects. The most...

The dynamics of hourly electricity prices in day-ahead markets is an important element of competitive power markets that were only established in the last decade. In electricity markets, the market microstructure does not allow for continuous trading, since operators require advance notice in...

Using a Dynamic Semiparametric Factor Model (DSFM) we investigate the term structure of interest rates. The proposed methodology is applied to monthly interest rates for four southern European countries: Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain from the introduction of the Euro to the recent European...