Evaluation of forecast optimality in economics and finance has almost exclusively been conducted on the assumption of mean squared error loss under which forecasts should be unbiased and forecast errors serially uncorrelated at the single period horizon with increasing variance as the forecast...

One of the most important findings in empirical finance has been the fact that returns are not i.i.d. Predictability, or time variation in the conditional distribution of returns, is one of the basic ingredients of asset pricing and portfolio choice models nowadays. Under the current renewed...

We frequently observe that one of the aims of time series analysts is to predict future values of the data. For weakly dependent data, when the model is known up to a finite set of parameters, its statistical properties are well documented and exhaustively examined. However, if the model was...

We look into the available macroeconomic figures and the predictions made about the recession in Greece by international organizations, Greek research centers, and the Greek government; and suggest that the predictions regarding the decline in real GDP in recent years were overly optimistic. The...

Most natural resources that are used in production are non-renewable. When they become depleted they are lost for future use. Does it follow that the limited availability of natural resources will at some time in the future constrain economic growth as many environmentalists believe? While...

Historical growth dynamics of energy technologies reveal a consistent relationship between the extent to which a technology’s installed capacity grows and the time duration of that growth. This extent – duration relationship is remarkably consistent across both supply-side and demand-side...

We use an innovative methodology to measure management practices in over 300 manufacturing firms in the UK. We then match this management data to production and energy usage information for establishments owned by these firms. We find that establishments in better managed firms are significantly...

In this paper we introduce a transformation of the Edgeworth-Sargan series expansion of the Gaussian distribution, that we call Positive Edgeworth-Sargan (PES). The main advantage of this new density is that it is well defined for all values in the parameter space, as well as it integrates up to...