In this paper, we develop the first formal nonparametric test for whether the observation errors in option panels display spatial dependence. The panel consists of options with different strikes and tenors written on a given underlying asset. The asymptotic design is of the infill type—the mesh of the strike grid for the observed options shrinks asymptotically to zero, while the set of observation times and tenors for the option panel remains fixed. We propose a Portmanteau test for the null hypothesis of no spatial autocorrelation in the observation error. The test makes use of the smoothness of the true (unobserved) option price as a function of its strike and is robust to the presence of heteroskedasticity of unknown form in the observation error. A Monte Carlo study shows good finite-sample properties of the developed testing procedure and an empirical application to S&P 500 index option data reveals mild spatial dependence in the observation error, which has been declining in recent years.

We consider a positive-valued time series whose conditional distribution has a time-varying mean, which may depend on exogenous variables. The main applications concern count or duration data. Under a contraction condition on the mean function, it is shown that stationarity and ergodicity hold when the mean and stochastic orders of the conditional distribution are the same. The latter condition holds for the exponential family parametrized by the mean, but also for many other distributions. We also provide conditions for the existence of marginal moments and for the geometric decay of the beta-mixing coefficients. We give conditions for consistency and asymptotic normality of the Exponential Quasi-Maximum Likelihood Estimator of the conditional mean parameters. Simulation experiments and illustrations on series of stock market volumes and of greenhouse gas concentrations show that the multiplicative-error form of usual duration models deserves to be relaxed, as allowed in this paper.

This paper proposes novel inference procedures for instrumental variable models in the presence of many, potentially weak instruments that are robust to the presence of heteroskedasticity. First, we provide an Anderson–Rubin-type test for the entire parameter vector that is valid under assumptions weaker than previously proposed Anderson–Rubin-type tests. Second, we consider the case of testing a subset of parameters under the assumption that a consistent estimator for the parameters not under test exists. We show that under the null, the proposed statistics have Gaussian limiting distributions and derive alternative chi-square approximations. An extensive simulation study shows the competitive finite sample properties in terms of size and power of our procedures. Finally, we provide an empirical application using college proximity instruments to estimate the returns to education.

Nonparametric series regression often involves specification search over the tuning parameter, that is, evaluating estimates and confidence intervals with a different number of series terms. This paper develops pointwise and uniform inferences for conditional mean functions in nonparametric series estimations that are uniform in the number of series terms. As a result, this paper constructs confidence intervals and confidence bands with possibly data-dependent series terms that have valid asymptotic coverage probabilities. This paper also considers a partially linear model setup and develops inference methods for the parametric part uniform in the number of series terms. The finite sample performance of the proposed methods is investigated in various simulation setups as well as in an illustrative example, that is, the nonparametric estimation of the wage elasticity of the expected labor supply from Blomquist and Newey (2002, Econometrica 70, 2455–2480).

The aim of this paper is to construct a robust nonparametric estimator for the production frontier. We study this problem under a regression model with one-sided errors, where the regression function defines the achievable maximum output, for a given level of inputs-usage, and the regression error defines the inefficiency term. The main tool is a concept of partial regression boundary defined as a special probability-weighted moment. This concept motivates a robustified unconditional alternative to the pioneering class of nonparametric conditional expected maximum production functions. We prove that both the resulting benchmark partial frontier and its estimator share the desirable monotonicity of the true full frontier. We derive the asymptotic properties of the partial and full frontier estimators, and unravel their behavior from a robustness theory point of view. We provide numerical illustrations and Monte Carlo evidence that the presented concept of unconditional expected maximum production functions is more efficient and reliable in filtering out noise than the original conditional version. The methodology is very easy and fast to implement. Its usefulness is discussed through two concrete datasets from the sector of Delivery Services, where outliers are likely to affect the traditional conditional approach.

In this article, we present a comprehensive study of asymptotic optimality of least squares model averaging methods. The concept of asymptotic optimality is that in a large-sample sense, the method results in the model averaging estimator with the smallest possible prediction loss among all such estimators. In the literature, asymptotic optimality is usually proved under specific weights restriction or using hardly interpretable assumptions. This article provides a new approach to proving asymptotic optimality, in which a general weight set is adopted, and some easily interpretable assumptions are imposed. In particular, we do not impose any assumptions on the maximum selection risk and allow a larger number of regressors than that of existing studies.