An important puzzle in international finance is the failure of the forward exchange rate to be a rational forecast of the future spot rate. It has often been suggested that this puzzle may be resolved by using better statistical procedures that correct for both non-stationarity and nonnormality...

This paper analyzes the existence of flight-to-quality from stocks to bonds and contagion between the two asset classes. Flight-to-quality is present if correlations between stocks and bonds strongly decrease in falling stock markets since this constitutes a movement of the asset classes in...

The preholiday behaviour of equity price and return indices on the Irish Stock Exchange do nor display consistent positive pre-holiday returns. This is contrary to the majority of studies on this area, and the result is found across a number of sectoral indices. The analysis also indicates that...

This paper investigates the predictive ability of financial variables for real growth in the euro area through bivariate and multivariate non-parametric Granger causality tests. Apart from assessing the within-country forecasting ability of commonly-employed financial variables, such as the term...

This paper examines banking and financial sector return co-movements between the three largest Central and Eastern European countries to have recently joined the European Union, namely the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. In order to build up an understanding of the soundness and stability of...

This paper is motivated by the fact that (part-time) individual farming is commonly observed among rural households in a number of transition economies but it is not clear prima facie if such resource allocation is optimal. A conceptual model of household labor allocation between individual...