Natural gas is likely to become increasingly important in the future. Understanding the stochastic underpinnings of natural gas prices will be critical, both to policy analysts and to market participants. To this end, we investigate the potential presence of jumps in natural gas spot prices in...

The popular scholarly exercise of evaluating exchange rate forecasting models relative to a random walk was stimulated by the well-cited Meese and Rogoff (1983) paper. Practitioners who construct quantitative models for trading exchange rates approach forecasting from a different perspective....

This paper examines short-term price reactions after one-day abnormal price changes and whether they create exploitable profit opportunities in various financial markets. A t-test confirms the presence of overreactions and also suggests that there is an “inertia anomaly”, i.e. after an...

How should one evaluate investment projects whose CCAPM betas are uncertain? This question is particularly crucial for projects yielding long-lasting impacts on the economy, as is the case for example for many green investments. We define the notion of a certainty equivalent beta. We show that...

We define a class of risk-taking-neutral (RTN) background risks. These background risks have the property that they will not alter decisions made with respect to another risk, for individuals with HARA utility. If we wish to compare a decision made with and without some exogenous background...

We investigate the role of banks information policies in fostering the accumulation of financial knowledge. In Italy, banks belonging to the PattiChiari Consortium implement policies aimed at increasing transparency and procedural simplification, without offering services at lower cost with...

The eurozone has a single short-term nominal interest rate, but monetary policy conditions measured by real short-term interest rates varied substantially across countries in the period 2003-2010. We use this cross-country variation in the (local) tightness of monetary policy to examine its...

We study the link between homeownership, mortgage debt, and entrepreneurship using a model of occupational choice and housing tenure where homeowners commit to mortgage payments. Our model predicts that, as long as mortgage rates exceed the rate of interest on liquid wealth: (i) mortgage debt,...

Under conditions of risk it makes a difference whether the discount rate is determined as an expected present or as an expected future value. This difference which is dubbed as the Weitzman-Gollier puzzle has stimulated an intensive discussion which, however, is somewhat confusing. In this paper...

The objective of this paper is to assess whether external debt makes a difference for public debt stabilization, where external debt is considered through the non-residents’ holdings according to a Balance of Payments perspective. The analysis is empirical and considers the case of Italy, one...