Monotonicity is a key qualitative prediction of a wide array of economic models derived via robust comparative statics. It is therefore important to design effective and practical econometric methods for testing this prediction in empirical analysis. This article develops a general nonparametric framework for testing monotonicity of a regression function. Using this framework, a broad class of new tests is introduced, which gives an empirical researcher a lot of flexibility to incorporate ex ante information she might have. The article also develops new methods for simulating critical values, which are based on the combination of a bootstrap procedure and new selection algorithms. These methods yield tests that have correct asymptotic size and are asymptotically nonconservative. It is also shown how to obtain an adaptive and rate optimal test that has the best attainable rate of uniform consistency against models whose regression function has Lipschitz-continuous first-order derivatives and that automatically adapts to the unknown smoothness of the regression function. Simulations show that the power of the new tests in many cases significantly exceeds that of some prior tests, e.g., that of Ghosal, Sen, and Van der Vaart (2000).

A mixture copula is a linear combination of several individual copulas that can be used to generate dependence structures not belonging to existing copula families. Because different pairs of markets may exhibit quite different dependence structures in empirical studies, mixture copulas are useful in modeling the dependence in financial data. Therefore, rather than selecting a single copula based on certain criteria, we propose using a model averaging approach to estimate financial data dependence structures in a mixture copula framework. We select weights (for averaging) by a J-fold Cross-Validation procedure. We prove that the model averaging estimator is asymptotically optimal in the sense that it minimizes the squared estimation loss. Our simulation results show that the model averaging approach outperforms some competing methods when the working mixture model is misspecified. Using 12 years of data on daily returns from four developed economies’ stock indexes, we show that the model averaging approach more accurately estimates their dependence structures than some competing methods.

This article considers the problem of inference for nested least squares averaging estimators. We study the asymptotic behavior of the Mallows model averaging estimator (MMA; Hansen, 2007) and the jackknife model averaging estimator (JMA; Hansen and Racine, 2012) under the standard asymptotics with fixed parameters setup. We find that both MMA and JMA estimators asymptotically assign zero weight to the under-fitted models, and MMA and JMA weights of just-fitted and over-fitted models are asymptotically random. Building on the asymptotic behavior of model weights, we derive the asymptotic distributions of MMA and JMA estimators and propose a simulation-based confidence interval for the least squares averaging estimator. Monte Carlo simulations show that the coverage probabilities of proposed confidence intervals achieve the nominal level.

This article develops new model selection methods for forecasting panel data using a set of least squares (LS) vector autoregressions. Model selection is based on minimizing the estimated quadratic forecast risk among candidate models. We provide conditions under which the selection criterion is asymptotically efficient in the sense of Shibata (1980) as n (cross sections) and T (time series) approach infinity. Relative to extant selection criteria, this criterion places a heavier penalty on model dimensionality in order to account for the effects of parameterized forms of cross sectional heterogeneity (such as fixed effects) on forecast loss. We also extend the analysis to bias-corrected least squares, showing that significant reductions in forecast risk can be achieved.