The thesis consists of a summary and three self-contained papers related to political transition and economic growth with parallel study of countries with and without Military Dictatorship (MD) history. <p> Paper [1]: studies the experience of 83 countries in 1950-2004 and addresses the question:...</p>

This paper investigates whether and under which conditions democracy renders economic performance more efficient. Efficiency, measured by the ratio of (mean)/ (standard deviation) of output growth, becomes an important indicator of the relative goodness of economic performance when countries...

This paper analyses the experience of 83 countries from the period of 1950-2004 and addresses the following question: when do democratic transitions produce (good) bad economic outcomes. Following the theoretical papers of Acemoglu et al. (2004, 2008(a)), an attempt is made to control for both...

This paper analyses the survival of four different growth regimes conditional on political regime transitions that occurred during the first or prior year of the economic regime. The results suggest that in countries with no history of military dictatorship (MD), the episodes of fast-growing...

This paper is the first to measure the profitability of day traders across volatility states. We apply a popular day trading strategy, the Opening Range Breakout strategy (ORB), on long time series of crude oil and S&P 500 futures contracts. Average returns are then calculated for each...

By using money management, an investor may determine the optimal leverage factor to apply on each trade, for maximizing the profitability of investing. Research suggests that the stopping of losses may increase the profitability of a trading strategy when returns follow momentum. This paper...

Is it possible to beat the market by mechanical trading rules based on historical and publicly known information? Such rules have long been used by investors and in this paper, we test the success rate of trades and profitability of the Open Range Breakout (ORB) strategy. An investor that trades...

This thesis consists of five self-contained papers, which are all related to the financial markets in the three Baltic States, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Paper [I] studies the impact of news from the Moscow and New York stock exchanges on the returns and volatilities of the Baltic States'...

The asymmetric moving average model (asMA) is extended to allow for asymmetric quadratic conditional heteroskedasticity (asQGARCH). The asymmetric parametrization of the conditional variance encompasses the quadratic GARCH model of Sentana (1995). We introduce a framework for testing asymmetries...

The paper studies two approaches to modelling conditional skewness in a nonlinear model for stock returns. It is found that a normal distribution can be rejected. A log-generalized gamma distribution with one time-varying density parameter, and in particular a Pearson IV specification with three...