Firms can finance themselves on- or off-balance sheet. Off-balance sheet financing involves transferring assets to "special purpose vehicles" (SPVs), following accounting and regulatory rules that circumscribe relations between the sponsoring firm and the SPVs. SPVs are carefully designed to...

This paper estimates the effect of sovereign debt renegotiation on international trade. Sovereign default may be associated with a subsequent decline in international trade either because creditors want to deter default by debtors, or because trade finance dries up after default. To estimate the...

When a sovereign faces the risk of debt default, it may be tempted to expropriate the private sector. This may be one reason for why international investment in private companies has to take into account the sovereign risk. But the likelihood of a transfer from the sovereign risk to corporate...

We analyze daily changes of two log foreign exchange (FX) rates involving the Deutsche Mark (DEM) for the period 1975 - 1998, namely FX-rates measured against the US dollar (USD) and the Japanese yen (JPY). Ta account for volatility e1ustering we fit a GARCH(l,l)-model with leptokurtic...

Multivariate Volatility Models belong to the class of nonlinear models for financial data. Here we want to focus on multivariate GARCH models. These models assume that the variance of the innovation distribution follows a time dependent process conditional on information which is generated by...

This article is concerned with the dynamic behaviour of UK unemployment. However, instead of using traditional approaches based on I(0) stationary or I(1) (integrated and/or cointegrated) models, we use the fractional integration framework. In doing so, we allow for a more careful study of the...

Let a process SI , ... ,ST obey the conditionally heteroskedastic equation St = Vt Et whcrc Et is a random noise and Vt is the volatility coefficient which in turn obeys an autoregression type equation log v t = w + a S t- l + nt with an additional noise nt. We consider the situation which the...

This paper uses fractional integration and cointegration in order to model the DM/dollar and the yen/dollar real exchange rates in terms of both monetary and real factors, more specifically real interest rate and labour productivity differentials. We find that whilst the individual series may be...

In this article we model the log of the U.S. and the U.K. real oil prices in terms of fractionally integrated processes with a mean shift. We use different versions of the tests of Robinson (1994), which have standard null and local limit distributions. The results indicate that if we model the...