This paper estimates the curvature of the Earth, defined as one over its radius, without relying on physical measurements. The orthodox model states that the Earth is (nearly) spherical with a curvature of π/20'000 km. By contrast, the heterodox flat-Earth model stipulates a curvature of zero....

This paper estimates the curvature of the Earth, defined as one over its radius, without using any physics. The orthodox model is that the Earth is nearly spherical with a curvature of Û/20, 000 km. By contrast, the heterodox flat-Earth model stipulates a curvature of zero. Abstracting from the...

This paper estimates the curvature of the Earth, defined as one over its radius, without using any physics. The orthodox model is that the Earth is nearly spherical with a curvature of π/20, 000 km. By contrast, the heterodox flat-Earth model stipulates a curvature of zero. Abstracting from the...

There is compelling evidence that many macroeconomic and financial variables are not generated by linear models. This evidence is based on testing linearity against either smooth nonlinearity or piece-wise linearity, but there is no framework that encompasses both. This paper provides an...

In this paper, we extend Bai and Perron's (1998, Econometrica, pp. 47-78) method for detecting multiple breaks to nonlinear models. To that end, we consider a nonlinear model that can be estimated via nonlinear least squares (NLS) and features a limited number of parameter shifts occurring at...

We analyze peer effects in sleeping behavior using a representative sample of U.S. teenagers from the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health. The sampling design of the survey causes the conventional 2SLS estimator to be inconsistent. We extend the NLS estimator in Wang and Lee...

In the economics of joint production one often distinguishes between the two cases: the one in which a firm produces multiple products each produced under separate production process, and the other “true joint production” where a number of outputs are produced from a single production...

State price densities (SPD) are an important element in applied quantitative finance. In a Black-Scholes model they are lognormal distributions with constant volatility parameter. In practice volatility changes and the distribution deviates from log-normality. We estimate SPDs using EUREX option...

Signal waveforms are very fast dampening oscillatory time series composed of exponential functions. The regular least squares fitting techniques are often unstable when used to fit exponential functions to such signal waveforms since such functions are highly correlated. Of late, some attempts...

No foolproof method exists to fit nonlinear curves to data or estimate the parameters of an intrinsically nonlinear function. Some methods succeed at solving a set of problems but fail at the others. The Differential Evolution (DE) method of global optimization is an upcoming method that has...