We develop a generally applicable framework for constructing efficient estimators of regression models via quantile regressions. The proposed method is based on optimally combining information over multiple quantiles and can be applied to a broad range of parametric and nonparametric settings. When combining information over a fixed number of quantiles, we derive an upper bound on the distance between the efficiency of the proposed estimator and the Fisher information. As the number of quantiles increases, this upper bound decreases and the asymptotic variance of the proposed estimator approaches the Cramér–Rao lower bound under appropriate conditions. In the case of nonregular statistical estimation, the proposed estimator leads to super-efficient estimation. We illustrate the proposed method for several widely used regression models. Both asymptotic theory and Monte Carlo experiments show the superior performance over existing methods.
We study estimation and inference of the expected shortfall for time series with infinite variance. Both the smoothed and nonsmoothed estimators are investigated. The rate of convergence is determined by the tail thickness parameter, and the limiting distribution is in the stable class with parameters depending on the tail thickness parameter of the time series and on the dependence structure, which makes inference complicated. A subsampling procedure is proposed to carry out statistical inference. We also analyze a nonparametric estimator of the conditional expected shortfall. A Monte Carlo experiment is conducted to evaluate the finite sample performance of the proposed inference procedure, and an empirical application to emerging market exchange rates (from October 1997 to October 2008) is conducted to highlight the proposed study.