Abstract:We discuss the so-called "simplifying assumption" of conditional copulas in a general framework. We introduce several tests of the latter assumption for non-and semiparametric copula models. Some related test procedures based on conditioning subsets instead of point-wise events are proposed. The limiting distributions of such test statistics under the null are approximated by several bootstrap schemes, most of them being new. We prove the validity of a particular semiparametric bootstrap scheme. Some simulations illustrate the relevance of our results.

We study nonparametric estimators of conditional Kendall's tau, a measure of concordance between two random variables given some covariates. We prove non-asymptotic pointwise and uniform bounds, that hold with high probabilities. We provide "direct proofs" of the consistency and the asymptotic law of conditional Kendall's tau. A simulation study evaluates the numerical performance of such nonparametric estimators.