In this paper, we analyse a novel panel data set to compare the relevance of alternative measures of capitalisation for bank failure during the 2007-10 crisis, and to search for evidence of manipulated Basel risk-weights.  Compared with the unweighted leverage ratio, we find the risk-weighted...

In recent years bonuses tied to performance have become commonplace in banks and other financial institutions; indeed they now constitute a major part of employee compensation.  The practice was originally justified by academic work on principal-agent contracts, which argued that performance...

Financial assets` quoted prices normally change through frequent revisions, or jumps. For markets where quotes are almost always revised by the minimum price tick, this paper proposes a new estimator of Quadratic Variation which is robust to microstructure effects. It compares the number of...

Theoretical models of growth and trade suggest that patterns of international specialisation are inherently dynamic and evolve endogenously over time. Initial comparative advantages are either reinforced or gradually unwound with the passage of time. This paper put forward an empirical framework...

This paper discusses and documents the algorithms of SsfPack 2.2. SsfPack is a suite of C routines for carrying out computations involving the statistical analysis of univariate and multivariate models in state space form. The emphasis is on documenting the link we have made to the Ox computing...

For financial assets whose best quotes almost always change by jumping by the market`s price tick size (one cent, five cents, etc.), this paper proposes an estimator of Quadratic Variation which controls for microstructure effects. It measures the prevalence of alternations, where quotes jump...

This paper studies the stability of nonlinear autoregressive models with conditionality heteroskedastic errors. We consider a nonlinear autoregression of order p (AR(p)) with the conditional variance specified as a nonlinear first order generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity...

Specific functional forms are often used in economic models of distributions; goodness-of-fit measures are used to assess whether a functional form is appropriate in the light of real-world data.  Standard approaches use a distance criterion based on the EDF, an aggregation of differences in...

This paper studies a class of Markov models which consist of two components. Typically, one of the components is observable and the other is unobservable or `hidden`. Conditions under which geometric ergodicity of the unobservable component is inherited by the joint process formed of the two...

Rational demand for hedging products, where there is a risk of contractual nonperformance, is fundamentally different to that for indemnity insurance.  In particular, optimal demand is zero for infinitely risk averse individuals, and is nonmonotonic in risk aversion, wealth and price.  For...