The present book was accepted as a dissertation at the Humboldt
Universitat zu Berlin in summer 1996. I am very much obliged to thank my
advisor, Professor Wolfgang Hardie, for the continuous, always inspiring
support and for opening me the world of non parametric statistics.
Without him I probably would have worked on a different, less exciting
topic and this book would not exist. Also, I would like to thank my
second advisor, Professor Helmut Liitkepohl, for his excellent
introduction to time series analysis and for always helpful comments on
my work. This work was financially supported by the Deutsche
Forschungsgemein- schaft, in the first stage while I was a member of the
Graduiertenkolleg "Ap- plied Microeconomics", and later when I came to
the Sonderforschungsbereich 373. For an interestingly widespread
academic surrounding I want to thank the members of the
Graduiertenkolleg and the Sonderforschungsbereich, es- pecially Stefan
Sperlich and Axel Werwatz. For the use of XploRe and many other issues I
received substantial help from my colleagues Sigbert Klinke, Thomas
Kotter, Marlene Miiller and Swetlana Schmelzer. Concerning many central
topics of this dissertation, helpful and improving comments were given
by Jorg Breitung, Helmut Herwartz, RolfTschernig and Lijian Yang, who
also revised most parts of the manuscript. I have much reason to thank
them for their help. Of course, all remaining errors are mine. Berlin,
July 1997 CHRISTIAN M 0 HAFNER Contents Preface . . . . . IX List of
Tables .