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This is a survey paper of the recent literature on the application of semiparametric–econometric advances to testing for functional form of the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC). The EKC postulates that there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between economic growth (typically measured by income) and pollution; that is, as economic growth expands, pollution increases up to a maximum and then starts declining after a threshold level of income. This hypothesized relationship is simple to visualize but has eluded many empirical investigations. A typical application of the EKC uses panel data models, which allows for heterogeneity, serial correlation, heteroskedasticity, data pooling, and smooth coefficients. This vast literature is reviewed in the context of semiparametric model specification tests. Additionally, recent developments in semiparametric econometrics, such as Bayesian methods, generalized time-varying coefficient models, and nonstationary panels are discussed as fruitful areas of future research. The cited literature is fairly complete and should prove useful to applied researchers at large.

Hausman (1978) represented a tectonic shift in inference related to the specification of econometric models. The seminal insight that one could compare two models which were both consistent under the null spawned a test which was both simple and powerful. The so-called ‘Hausman test’ has been applied and extended theoretically in a variety of econometric domains. This paper discusses the basic Hausman test and its development within econometric panel data settings since its publication. We focus on the construction of the Hausman test in a variety of panel data settings, and in particular, the recent adaptation of the Hausman test to semiparametric and nonparametric panel data models. We present simulation experiments which show the value of the Hausman test in a nonparametric setting, focusing primarily on the consequences of parametric model misspecification for the Hausman test procedure. A formal application of the Hausman test is also given focusing on testing between fixed and random effects within a panel data model of gasoline demand.

This paper examined the volatility models for exchange rate return, including Random Walk model, AR model, GARCH model and extensive GARCH model, with Normal and Student-t distribution assumption as well as nonparametric specification test of these models. We fit these models to Bangladesh foreign exchange rate index from January 1999 to December 31, 2012. The return series of Bangladesh foreign exchange rate are leptokurtic, significant skewness, deviation from normality as well as the returns series are volatility clustering as well. We found that student t distribution into GARCH model improves the better performance to forecast the volatility for Bangladesh foreign exchange market. The traditional likelihood comparison showed that the importance of GARCH model in modeling of Bangladesh foreign market, but the modern nonparametric specification test found that RW, AR and the model with GARCH effect are still grossly mis-specified. All these imply that there is still a long way before we reach the adequate specification for Bangladesh exchange rate dynamics.

The purpose of this paper is to use investor sentiment (IS) as a conditioning information variable for the cross-sectional return predictability tests of alternative asset pricing models (APMs).

Cross-sectional tests of alternative APMs in the linear beta representation and stochastic discount factor specifications, Fama and Macbeth and generalized method of moments techniques have been used.

Results reveal that IS as a conditioning information variable contains significant information for making the discount factors time varying. Model comparison test statistics suggests that among the alternative APMs, the conditional five-factor model (FFM) performs better.

Empirical analysis does not extend to the inclusion of the business-cycle conditioning information variables for the test of APMs.

The potential benefit of the conditional FFM can be leveraged upon for cost of capital determination, and mutual fund manager’s portfolio performance evaluation when the portfolio is heavily weighted with sentiment-sensitive hard to value and difficult to arbitrage stocks. During volatile and boom periods in stock markets the IS scaled conditional APMs may be useful for the fundamental value determination of sentiment-sensitive stocks.

This study extends available literature in the context of both developed and emerging equity markets by exploring the cross-sectional tests of conditional APMs using IS as the conditioning information variable. To the author’s knowledge, this is perhaps the first study that examines IS as conditioning information for the cross-sectional tests of alternative APMs.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an extensive review of the monetary model of exchange rate determination which is the main theoretical framework on analyzing exchange rate behavior over the last 40 years. Furthermore, we test the flexible price monetarist variant and the sticky price Keynesian variant of the monetary model. We conduct our analysis employing a sample of 14 advanced economies using annual data spanning the period 1880–2012.

The theoretical background of the paper relies on the monetary model to the exchange rate determination. We provide a thorough econometric analysis using a battery of unit root and cointegration testing techniques. We test the price-flexible monetarist version and the sticky-price version of the model using annual data from 1880 to 2012 for a group of industrialized countries.

We provide strong evidence of the existence of a nonlinear relationship between exchange rates and fundamentals. Therefore, we model the time-varying nature of this relationship by allowing for Markov regime switches for the exchange rate regimes. Modeling exchange rates within this context can be motivated by the fact that the change in regime should be considered as a random event and not predictable. These results show that linearity is rejected in favor of an MS-VECM specification which forms statistically an adequate representation of the data. Two regimes are implied by the model; the one of the estimated regimes describes the monetary model whereas the other matches in most cases the constant coefficient model with wrong signs. Furthermore it is shown that depending on the nominal exchange rate regime in operation, the adjustment to the long run implied by the monetary model of the exchange rate determination came either from the exchange rate or from the monetary fundamentals. Moreover, based on a Regime Classification Measure, we showed that our chosen Markov-switching specification performed well in distinguishing between the two regimes for all cases. Finally, it is shown that fundamentals are not only significant within each regime but are also significant for the switches between the two regimes.

The results are of interest to practitioners and policy makers since understanding the evolution and determination of exchange rates is of crucial importance. Furthermore, our results are linked to forecasting performance of exchange rate models.

The present analysis extends previous analyses on exchange rate determination and it provides further support in favor of the monetary model as a long-run framework to understand the evolution of exchange rates.

This paper aims to investigate whether the use of conditional and unconditional Fama and French (1993) three-factor and Carhart (1997) four-factor asset pricing models (APMs) captures the role of asset pricing anomalies in the context of emerging stock market like India.

The first step time series regression approach has been used to drive the risk-adjusted returns of individual securities. For examining the predictability of firm characteristics or asset pricing anomalies on the risk-adjusted returns of individual securities, the panel data estimation technique has been used.

Fama and French (1993) three-factor and Carhart (1997) four-factor model in their unconditional specifications capture the impact of book-to-market price and liquidity effects completely. When alternative APMs in their conditional specifications are tested, the importance of medium- and long-term momentum effects has been captured to a greater extent. The size, market leverage and short-term momentum effects still persist even in the case of alternative unconditional and conditional APMs.

The empirical analysis does not extend for different market scenarios like high and low volatile market or good and bad macroeconomic environment. Because of the constraint of data availability, the authors could not include certain important anomalies like net operating assets, change in gross profit margin, external equity and debt financing and idiosyncratic risk.

Although the active investment approach in stock market shares a common ground of semi-strong form of market efficiency hypothesis which also supports the presence of asset pricing anomalies, less empirical evidence has been explored in this regard to support or repute such belief of practitioners. Our empirical findings make an attempt in this regard to suggest certain anomaly-based trading strategy that can be followed for active portfolio management.

From an emerging market perspective, this paper provides out-of-sample empirical evidence toward the use of conditional Fama and French three-factor and Carhart four-factor APMs for the complete explanation of market anomalies. This approach retains its importance with respect to the comprehensiveness of analysis considering alternative APMs for capturing unique effects of market anomalies.

In this chapter we investigate the finite sample properties of a Hausman test for the spatial error model (SEM) proposed by Pace and LeSage (2008). In particular, we demonstrate that the power of their test could be very low against a natural alternative like the spatial autoregressive (SAR) model.

This paper considers a class of parametric models with nonparametric autoregressive errors. A new test is established and studied to deal with the parametric specification of the nonparametric autoregressive errors with either stationarity or nonstationarity. Such a test procedure can initially avoid misspecification through the need to parametrically specify the form of the errors. In other words, we estimate the form of the errors and test for stationarity or nonstationarity simultaneously. We establish asymptotic distributions of the proposed test. Both the setting and the results differ from earlier work on testing for unit roots in parametric time series regression. We provide both simulated and real-data examples to show that the proposed nonparametric unit root test works in practice.

I review the burgeoning literature on applications of Markov regime switching models in empirical finance. In particular, distinct attention is devoted to the ability of Markov Switching models to fit the data, filter unknown regimes and states on the basis of the data, to allow a powerful tool to test hypotheses formulated in light of financial theories, and to their forecasting performance with reference to both point and density predictions. The review covers papers concerning a multiplicity of sub-fields in financial economics, ranging from empirical analyses of stock returns, the term structure of default-free interest rates, the dynamics of exchange rates, as well as the joint process of stock and bond returns.