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This paper presents evidence that Ordinary Least Squares estimators of beta coefficients of major firms and portfolios are highly sensitive to observations of extremes in market index returns. This sensitivity is rooted in the inconsistency of the quadratic loss function in financial theory. By introducing considerations of risk aversion into the estimation procedure using alternative estimators measures of variability we can overcome this lack of robustness and improve the reliability of the results.

The paper investigates the impact of the selected factors on the healthy life years of men and women in the EU countries. The multiple quantile spatial autoregression models are used in order to account for substantial differences in the healthy life years and life quality across the EU members. Quantile regression allows studying dependencies between variables in different quantiles of the response distribution. Moreover, this statistical tool is robust against violations of the classical regression assumption about the distribution of the error term. Parameters of the models were estimated using instrumental variable method (Kim, Muller 2004), whereas the confidence intervals and p-values were bootstrapped.

In a number of applications, a crucial problem consists in describing and analyzing the influence of a vector Xi of covariates on some real-valued response variable Yi. In the present context, where the observations are made over a collection of sites, this study is more difficult, due to the complexity of the possible spatial dependence among the various sites. In this paper, instead of spatial mean regression, we thus consider the spatial quantile regression functions. Quantile regression has been considered in a spatial context. The main aim of this paper is to incorporate quantile regression and spatial econometric modeling. Substantial variation exists across quantiles, suggesting that ordinary regression is insufficient on its own. Quantile estimates of a spatial-lag model show considerable spatial dependence in the different parts of the distribution.

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