This paper investigates the efficiency of the two major stock indexes of the Iberian Peninsula, the Portuguese Stock Index (PSI-20) and the Spanish Stock Index (IBEX-35). We used daily data from January 1993 to September 2001 for the Portuguese stock index and daily data from October 1990 to...

This paper challenges the commonly used unit root/cointegration approach for testing the Fisher effect for the economies of the G7 countries. We first prove that nominal interest and inflation rate can be better represented as being broken trend stationary variables. Later, we use the Bai-Perron...

Using one of the key property of copulas that they remain invariant under an arbitrary monotonous change of variable, we investigate the null hypothesis that the dependence between financial assets can be modeled by the Gaussian copula. We find that most pairs of currencies and pairs of major...

The standard confidence regions based on the first-order approximation of quantile regression estimators can be inaccurate in small samples. We show that confidence regions based on the smoothed empirical likelihood ratio have coverage errors of order n^{-1} and may be Bartlett-corrected to...

I use numerical methods to test for the presence of one-time structural breaks in the conditional variance of nominal interest rate spreads in four European countries over a period of eleven years (Jan 1988 to Dec 1998). I start with an intuitive approach consisting of a sequence of breakpoint...

Testing for unit roots in short-term interest rates plays a key role in the empirical modelling of these series. It is widely assumed that the volatility of interest rates follows some time-varying function which is dependent of the level of the series. This may cause distortions in the...

In recent years two classes of switching models have been proposed, the Markov switching models, Hamilton (1989) and the Threshold Auto- Regressive Models (TAR), Lim and Tong (1980). These two models have the advantage of being able to modelize and capture asymmetry, sudden changes and...

This paper brings together a number of new specification search strategies in spatial econometric modeling. In the literature, experimental results for several forward stepwise strategies aimed at remedying spatial dependence, have been reported. Essentially, these strategies boil down to the...

The aim of this paper is to provide evidence on the nature of the relationship between the terms of trade and the trade balance for US on a scale-by-scale basis using wavelet analysis. Thus, after decomposing the two variables into their time-scale components using to the maximum overlap...

In this paper, we focus on and examine the empirical evidence of non- linearity in aggregate Canadian unemployment. Contrary to the conclusion reached in Murray et al. (1993), and using a corrected for bias simple non-parametric test (SNT), we reject the null hypothesis of a linear structure for...