International and domestic tourism are leading economic activities in the world today. Tourism has been known to generate goods and services directly and indirectly, attract foreign currency, stimulate employment, and provide opportunities for investment. It has also been recognized as an...

This paper investigates the conditional correlations and volatility spillovers between the crude oil and financial markets, based on crude oil returns and stock index returns. Daily returns from 2 January 1998 to 4 November 2009 of the crude oil spot, forward and futures prices from the WTI and...

The paper examines the performance of four multivariate volatility models, namely CCC, VARMA-GARCH, DCC, BEKK and diagonal BEKK, for the crude oil spot and futures returns of two major benchmark international crude oil markets, Brent and WTI, to calculate optimal portfolio weights and optimal...

Asia is presently the most important market for the production and consumption of natural rubber. World prices of rubber are not only subject to changes in demand, but also to speculation regarding future markets. Japan and Singapore are the major futures markets for rubber, while Thailand is...

Crude oil price volatility has been analyzed extensively for organized spot, forward and futures markets for well over a decade, and is crucial for forecasting volatility and Value-at- Risk (VaR). There are four major benchmarks in the international oil market, namely West Texas Intermediate...

This paper studies a Monte Carlo algorithm for computing distributions of state variables when the underlying model is a Markov process. It is shown that the L1 error of the estimator always converges to zero with probability one, and often at a parametric rate. A related technique for computing...

Modelling, monitoring and forecasting volatility are indispensible to sensible portfolio risk management. The volatility of an asset of composite index can be traded by using volatility derivatives, such as volatility and variance swaps, options and futures. The most popular volatility index is...

A government's ability to forecast key economic fundamentals accurately can affect business confidence, consumer sentiment, and foreign direct investment, among others. A government forecast based on an econometric model is replicable, whereas one that is not fully based on an econometric model...

TTourism is a major source of service receipts. The two leading tourism countries for Taiwan are Japan and USA. Daily data from 1/1/1990 to 31/12/2008 are used to model tourist arrivals from the world, USA and Japan to Taiwan, as well as their associated volatility. Inclusion of the exchange...

Time series data affect many aspects of our lives. This paper highlights ten things we should all know about time series, namely: a good working knowledge of econometrics and statistics, an awareness of measurement errors, testing for zero frequency, seasonal and periodic unit roots, analysing...