Markets reacted strongly to the World Trade Center attacks both in Europe and in the United States. The extent of this crisis was difficult to assess at the time, underlining the need for a specific tool to measure the magnitude of financial crises. A first measure was recently proposed and...

A well known result is that the Gaussian log-likelihood can be expressed as the sum over different frequency components. This implies that the likelihood ratio statistic has a similar linear decomposition. We exploit these observations to devise diagnostic methods that are useful for...

Housing and pension wealth are shown to be important determinants of personal sector consumption and retirement behaviour in the UK. Housing and state pension wealth have a positive effect on consumption, while private pension wealth promotes greater savings. Greater private defined benefit...

The paper analyzes the existence and impact of …nancing constraints as a possibly serious obstacle to innovation by …rms. Direct measures of …nancing constraints are employed using survey data collected by the Banque de France and Eurostat, which overcomes the problems with the traditional...

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...

We develop in this paper a general econometric methodology referred to as the Simulated Asymptotic Least Squares (SALS). It is shown that this approach provides a unifying theory for 'approximation-based' or simulation-based inference methods and nests the Simulated Nonlinear Least Squares...

The recent crisis underlined that proper estimation of distress-dependence amongst banks in a global system is essential for financial stability assessment. We present a set of banking stability measures embedding banks’ linear (correlation) and nonlinear distress-dependence, and their changes...

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...

We propose a new method of testing stochastic dominance which improves on existing tests based on bootstrap or subsampling. Our test requires estimation of the contact sets between the marginal distributions. Our tests have asymptotic sizes that are exactly equal to the nominal level uniformly...