In this paper, we study the effects of US target rate changes and related communications by members of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors on spreads for emerging market sovereign credit default swaps (CDS). Using GARCH models, we find that during the pre-financial crisis sub-sample (April...

Let (X1, Y1), . . ., (Xn, Yn) be i.i.d. rvs and let l(x) be the unknown p-quantile regression curve of Y on X. A quantile-smoother ln(x) is a localised, nonlinear estimator of l(x). The strong uniform consistency rate is established under general conditions. In many applications it is necessary...

We argue that criticism concerning the Chinese dollar peg is misplaced as no predictable link exists between the exchange rate and the trade balance of an international creditor economy. The stable nominal yuan/dollar rate is argued to have stabilized Chinese, East Asian and global growth....

We suggest a robust form of conditional moment test as a constructive test for functional misspecification in multiplicative error models. The proposed test has power solely against violations of the conditional mean restriction but is not affected by any other type of model misspecification....

Common approaches to test for the economic value of directional forecasts are based on the classical Chi-square test for independence, Fisher’s exact test or the Pesaran and Timmerman (1992) test for market timing. These tests are asymptotically valid for serially independent observations....

This brief exposition suggests that the Federal Reserve System temporarily guarantee a lower bound on stock prices in order to escape the current combination of liquidity trap and credit crunch. It shortly discusses reasons for this measure, consequences, and some alternatives. It is meant as a...