This dissertation contains three essays concerning two broad areas, namely, optimal capital structure and risky assets modeling. In the first paper, we study corporate debt values, capital structure, and the term structure of interest rates in a unified framework. We employ numerical techniques...

This dissertation focuses on the heterogeneous production technologies in banking and finance within the context of efficiency-analyses.The first essay studies the cost efficiency of Turkish banking industry. Studies of bank efficiency tend to draw conclusions from pooled estimates, assuming...

The so-called purchasing-power parity (PPP) puzzle takes one of two forms. In its first form, early tests of the PPP-hypothesis failed to reject unit roots in real exchange rates, thus rejecting the hypothesis of PPP holding in the long term. In the more recent literature, the literature on the...

The recent literature on “convergence� of cross-country per capita incomes has been dominated by two competing hypotheses: “global convergence� and “club-convergence�. This debate has recently relied on the study of limiting...

We propose a set of algorithms for testing the ergodicity of empirical time series, without reliance on a specific parametric framework. It is shown that the resulting test asymptotically obtains the correct size for stationary and nonstationary processes, and maximal power against non-ergodic...

We investigate the joint dynamics of oil prices, financial liquidity and geopolitical risk, within a multi-country global vector-autoregressive (GVAR) model. We find that low oil prices are expected to trigger higher levels of geopolitical risk, and that decelerating financial liquidity serves...

The paper considers investment and growth in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Notwithstanding cross-country differences, investment as a whole has been too low, too heavily tilted toward the public sector, too highly dependent on external influences, and less productive than in...

We investigate risk preferences of a sample of hurricane Katrina evacuees shortly after they were evacuated and transported to Houston, and another sample from the same population taken a year later. We also consider a third sample of resident Houstonians with demographics similar to the Katrina...