A Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) is a comprehensive, economy-wide data framework of real accounts, typically representing the economy of a nation but also providing the link between the economy and the rest of the world in terms of trade flows. However, in order to have complete picture of the...

The dating of cyclical phenomena in economies, such as business cycles, is at the core of economic policy research. Moreover, policy decisions which are due to affect interacting economies should take into account the economies' connectedness and synchronicity. The cross-country analysis of...

Investigate how retail investors determine their stock trading through experience to achieve the desired portfolio returns. To examine how retail investors coordinate their expected returns and perceived risk. Verify how retail investors’ trade potentials augment transactions on the stock...

This paper evaluates if and how speculation affects the volatility of commodity futures: it distinguishes between short term and long term measures of speculation and investigates if the impact on volatility is different. Speculation is measured by means of four indexes: scalping, Working’s T,...

In a recent line of research the low interest-rate environment of the early to mid 2000s is viewed as an element that triggered increased risk-taking appetite of banks in search for yield. This paper uses approximately 7,000 annual observations on banks of the CEE countries over the period...

This study investigates the impact of stock market development on economic growth in China. To this end, the quarterly data from 1996 to 2011 are used and the empirical investigation is conducted within the unit root and the cointegration framework. The results show that the relationship between...

In a Bayesian setting, investments can be risky either because they are opaque, i.e., their payoff-relevant signals are noisy, or because they are fundamentally risky, i.e., the variance of the prior is high. When interest rates are low (high), investors favor opaque (transparent) projects that...

Options should play an important role in asset allocation. They allow for kernel spanning and provide access to additional (priced) risk factors such as stochastic volatility and negative jumps. Unfortunately, traditional methods of asset allocation (e.g. mean-variance optimization) are not...

The fact that the literature tends to find biases in national fiscal projections has led to a growing claim in the academic and policy arenas for the need to introduce independent forecasts in the fiscal domain, prepared by independent agencies, like the European Commission (EC) in the case...