Oil prices increased dramatically during 2004-6. Industry experts initially attributed these price increases to fundamental factors such as the rise in global demand, but also because of disruptions in the supply of oil. The price increases however were so substantial that additional factors are...

The equity premium of the S&P 500 Index is explained in this paper by several variables that can be grouped into fundamental, behavioral and macroeconomic factors. We hypothesize that the statistical significance of these variables changes across economic regimes. The three regimes we consider...

The financial crisis of 2007-09 has led to a rethinking of the role of monetary and financial regulatory policy. It has also called into question the benefits of financial innovation and monetary policy that focuses solely on inflation and the output gap. This paper discusses financial...

In this chapter the authors seek to provide a general overview of the international markets for foreign exchange (FX) and FX derivatives as well as the theoretical relationships that tie these markets together with interest rates and central bank policies. The first section provides a brief...

We perform non-linearity tests using daily data for leading currencies that include the Australian dollar, British pound, Brazilian real, Canadian dollar, euro, Japanese yen, Mexican peso, and the Swiss franc to resolve the issue of whether these currencies are driven by fundamentals or...

This paper investigates inter-relationships among the price behavior of oil, gold and the euro using time series and neural network methodologies. Traditionally gold is a leading indicator of future inflation. Both the demand and supply of oil as a key global commodity are impacted by...

This study uses two data mining methodologies: Classification and Regression Trees (C&RT) and Generalized Rule Induction (GRI) to uncover patterns among daily cash closing prices of eight currency markets. Data from 2000 through 2009 is used, with the last year held out to test the robustness of...

This paper reexamines the main arguments of whether or not monetary policy should respond to asset bubbles. The question of how the central bank should respond to an asset bubble can be reformulated in two ways. First, how does the central bank respond while an asset bubble is growing, and...

The Stochastic Discount Factor (SDF) methodology is a general and convenient framework for asset pricing. SDF encapsulates all the modeling uncertainties and its advantage is that we do not require the knowledge of investors' preferences. Suitable specification of SDF is, therefore, critical. It...

In this paper we consider two new independent variables as inputs to the Taylor Rule. These are the equity and housing momentum variables and are introduced to investigate the potential usefulness of these two variables in guiding the Fed to lean against potential bubbles. Such effectiveness...