Credit risk models like Moody’s KMV are now well established in the market and give bond managers reliable estimates of default probabilities for individual firms. Until now it has been hard to relate those probabilities to the actual credit spreads observed on the market for corporate bonds....

A welfare analysis of a risky policy is impossible within a linear or linearized model and its certainty equivalence property. The presented algorithms are designed as a toolbox for a general model class. The computational challenges are considerable and I concentrate on the numerics 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...

Inflation is a far from homogeneous phenomenon, but this fact is ignored in most work on consumer price inflation. Using a novel methodology grounded in theory, the ten sub-components of the consumer price index (excluding mortgage interest rates, or CPIX) for South Africa are modeled separately...

In this paper, we survey a wide range of theoretical and empirical papers on derivatives markets to address the information contents of trading activities in derivatives markets. Both theoretical and empirical research on options market and futures market indicate that the presence of...

The aims of this paper are estimate and forecast the Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment, or NAIRU, for Brazilian unemployment time series data. In doing so, we introduce a methodology for estimating mixed additive seasonal autoregressive (MASAR) models, by the Generalized Method of...

In this paper we develop tests of functional form that are consistent against a class of nonlinear "smooth transition" models of the conditional mean. Our method is an extension of the consistent model specification tests developed by Bierens (1990), de Jong (1996) and Bierens and Ploberger...

Power-law tail behavior and the summation scheme of Levy-stable (alpha- stable) distributions is the basis for their frequent use as models when fat tails above a Gaussian distribution are observed. However, recent studies suggest that financial asset returns exhibit tail exponents well above...

White's (1984) concept of asymptotic variance is shown to allow some ambiguities when used to study asymptotic efficiency. These ambiguities are resolved with some mild conditions on the estimators being studied, because then White's asymptotic variance is an equivalence class in which...

THIS STUDY INVESTIGATES THE DOMINANT RESOURCE CONSTRAINT LIMITING GROWTH IN NIGERIA AS WELL AS THE DETERMINATION OF FUTURE RESOURCES REQUIREMENTS NEEDED TO ACHIEVE SUCH GROWTH. USING A SMALL SCALE MACROECONOMETRIC SIMULATION MODEL, THREE DIFFERENT EXPERIMENTS WERE CARRIED OUT. THE RESULTS SHOWED...