One of the prevalent topics in the economic growth literature is the debate between neoclassical, semi-endogenous, and endogenous growth theories regarding the model that best describes the data. An important part of this discussion can be summarized in three mutually exclusive hypotheses: the...

The measurement of market risk poses major challenges to researchers and different economic agents. On one hand, it is by now widely recognized that risk varies over time. On the other hand, the risk profile of an investor, in terms of investment horizon, makes it crucial to also assess risk at...

In the context of a common monetary policy, tracking euro area economic developments becomes essential. The aim of this paper is to build monthly coincident and leading composite indicators for the euro area business cycle. However, instead of looking at the overall comovement between the...

This paper focuses on Bayesian Vector Auto-Regressive (BVAR) models for the euro area. A modified hyperparameterization scheme based on the Minnesota prior that takes into account the economic nature of the variables in the model is used. The merits of incorporating long-run relationships are...

The assessment of the comovement among international stock markets is of key interest, for example, for the international portfolio diversification literature. In this paper, we re-examine such comovement by resorting to a novel approach, wavelet analysis. Wavelet analysis allows one to measure...

In this paper we investigate the impact of non-stationary cycles on the asymptotic and finite sample properties of standard unit root tests. Results are presented for the augmented Dickey-Fuller normalised bias and t-ratio-based tests (Dickey and Fuller, 1979, and Said and Dickey, 1984), the...

Over recent years several methods to deal with high-frequency data (economic, financial and other) have been proposed in the literature. An interesting example is for instance interval valued time series described by the temporal evolution of high and low prices of an asset. In this paper a new...

This paper focuses on the analytical discussion of a robust t-test for predictability and on the analysis of its finite-sample properties. Our analysis shows that the procedure proposed exhibits approximately correct size even in fairly small samples. Furthermore, the test is well-behaved under...

The intangibility of banking services makes the evaluation of service quality and customer convenience difficult to measure. Bankers obviously recognize the importance of intangible factors, but because of pressures placed on operating margins caused by the current economic climate and...

Most banks have been negatively affected by the recent economic recession, which has forced them to evaluate their operating performance including the financial performance of bank branches. Approaches that have been applied to address the financial performance evaluation of bank branches...